World's First 2GB Graphics Card Is Here

An anonymous reader writes "TUL Corporation's PCS HD4850 is the world's first graphics card to offer on-board 2gig video memory. The card is based on RV770 core chip, with 800 stream processors and 2GB of GDDR3 high-speed memory." That's more memory than I've had in any computer prior to this year — for a video card.

Comments

2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great for the pointless eye-candy first-person shooters. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[jandrese]

Actually, it's pointless for FPS style games. They'll never use even a GB of that memory effectively because the games are designed around people with 512MB at the high end. The only reason I see to buy this card is maybe there are drivers optimized for professional work where the memory requirements are much higher (3D modelers and the like).

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Kamokazi]

Actually no game currently utilizes that much video memory (unless one does some funky pre-loading I haven't heard about). Heck few even use more than 512MB.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[TheEmrys]

Depends on the resolution. If you are playing at 2560x1920, with AA and AF at high levels, and texture details set high, you can eat up quite a lot of memory.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last years ATI FireGL V8650 has 2GB of video memory. THEY were the first in the industry with 2GBs.

Come on guys.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[kabocox]

Actually, it's pointless for FPS style games. They'll never use even a GB of that memory effectively because the games are designed around people with 512MB at the high end. The only reason I see to buy this card is maybe there are drivers optimized for professional work where the memory requirements are much higher (3D modelers and the like).

I always thought that FPS was the genre that was really pushing this gotta have a massive video card thing. I couldn't even tell you what my video card is other than nvidia something. I've got 512MB of main memory. The only two games that I really hurt playing on my system are simcity4 and civ4. Both are perfectly playable, but Civ4 crawls way sooner than most civ games. Used to be you'd expect those end game turns to take 15-20 min to complete. Now it's those beginning to mid game turns taking that long.

SimCity4 will load and play. It'll take "awhile" to load though. I've gotten off the entire PC gaming thing lately. Last Christmas my wife got me like 12 PS2 RPGs. I've yet to make it through about half of them.

Go to walmart and see that desktop/laptop that they are selling for about $500. That's what game makers really want to be their base line target audience. Oh, they'll make it where $3500 rigs will make their product really shiny, but when it comes down to it, that'll always be a niche audience. It's those masses of PC owners that the game makers really want to sell to.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[the_humeister]

You could always use it as a ram drive!

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

use it for swap..

http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2008/06/use_video_ram_as_swap_in_linux.html

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[VeNoM0619]

IANA3DGFXE (I Am Not A 3D Graphics Expert) but I believe AA (anti-aliasing) is after processing to a scene, as well as 2560x1920 (resolution). Seeing how it smooths edges of objects, or paints extra objects to the extra pixel space. I don't know what AF is though.

But you are right, this is MEMORY, more models/animations = more memory requirements = bigger maps. So yes this is needed (eventually), add to the fact that physics is now being implemented in GPUs (I have only briefly touched the code, which doesn't seem to take much additional memory though).

I think the biggest gain in 2gb memory is the map sizes for games. Polygon count can also be increased in models as well, as well as higher definition texture levels (I still have yet to understand the difference between "low" "medium" "high" texture, as if there's actually a standard that one has "x" extra resolution/colors.) Maybe someday we will get to the extra super high def texture level where you can zoom in and see the "atoms" or skin cells when you look at characters...as if that will be necessary?

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[xonar]

Great for the pointless eye-candy first-person shooters. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

Have you considered the numerous other applications for a high-end video card such as this? 3D modeling to name one. Although this is obviously marketed toward the gaming market, I wouldn't rule out legitimate uses for this product.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Firehed]

It's an e-penis thing. Surely you walked by a 256MB Radeon 9200 in a Best Buy at some point. The chip on that card could hardly make use of 32MB, but I'll be damned if they won't add useless memory if it helps part a fool with his money.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[mr_mischief]

The maps tend to be stored in main system memory. The graphics tend to be stored in graphics memory. You indeed need extra memory capacity, processor speed, and memory bandwidth for some of the post processing. However, resolution is not post-processing. Higher resolution means more pixels. More pixels means more RGB values in memory. More pixels also means more things to post-process. A higher polygon count and more textures can use more video memory, too.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[mr_mischief]

The FireGL is intended for workstations. This is a consumer card. TFS didn't mention that, but it's a distinction worth making.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[init100]

I don't know what AF is though.

Anisotropic Filtering?

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[iminplaya]

Still using XP?

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[default luser]

Actually, it's pointless for FPS style games. They'll never use even a GB of that memory effectively because the games are designed around people with 512MB at the high end.

They're only doing this because DDR3 is much cheaper than the DDR5 on the 4870. A 2GB 4850 with DDR3 is cheaper than a 1GB 4870 with DDR5. Me, I can't see the value of getting a card with more than 1GB, even for future games.

The only reason I see to buy this card is maybe there are drivers optimized for professional work where the memory requirements are much higher (3D modelers and the like).

There won't be. This card is marketed as a 4850, not a FireGL, which means it won't be all that useful or professionals. Without the drivers to accelerate professional applications, the extra memory is largely useless.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Stepnsteph]

A number of you seem to be completely missing the point. Let me help you with that.

First, throw your assumptions out of the window.

You (and "you" being just about all of you here) seem to think that the RAM and raw power of the 3D card is only used in an FPS. That shows that you are terribly uninformed.

The RAM on the card allows more objects and/or higher quality textures, amongst other things. Simply put, the more video memory that is available the more elaborate and beautiful your surroundings can be.

In addition to this, higher display resolutions require more video memory. With higher resolutions comes the requirement to store more objects and process more data. These higher resolutions are becoming quite common these days thanks to the popularity of wide screen monitors.

When you add these two situations together, you suddenly have a case where you NEED a very good 3D card with a whole lot of memory in order to play ANY game in its intended beauty.

This will be true for an RPG just as much as it is for an FPS.

Good graphics are not limited to the FPS genre. RPG titles make use of some beautiful visuals as well. Oblivion was one example, though I personally never really liked the game.

An MMORPG will also gobble up the massive horse power and large amount of RAM available on new cards. More players on screen means more objects, more textures, more particle effects, more animations; more everything. A great deal of video lag (and deaths) can be prevented by having a decent 3D card.

Honestly, this 2 GB of RAM is much needed these days.

If you're still sitting on a 17" 4:3 monitor and you only run games that are 3 or 4 years old then you probably don't need this. Some of you are happy with that, and that's fine.

The majority of people are not. Whatever the reasons why you're comfortable in that situation, they won't matter to everyone else. That includes folks who play RPGs, both online and offline.

That some (*cough*many*cough*) of you automatically insult people who would buy this wreaks of ignorance, jealousy, pomposity, and an attempt to justify your own languid situation.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[xouumalperxe]

A framebuffer for a 2560x1600, 32 bits per pixel display (the highest resolution you're likely to find on a monitor that's even remotely reasonable for home use) would take up around 15 MiB. make it triple buffering with 64 bpp (for what, exactly, I don't know. But it's a worst case scenario), and you're still only at 90 megs. Sure, 90 megs is a big chunk of a 512 MiB card, but I seriously doubt that it's going to have much impact on a 1 GiB card. It *is*, however, going to hurt -- a lot -- insofar as raw processing power is concerned. To fully use a 2 GiB card, you're either using massively large textures, or some never-before-seen technology, like fully loading map meshes into VRAM and using your card's geometry transform capabilities to do funky stuff with them. In those terms, I guess I'll buy one of these when Will Wright teams up with John Carmack. :)

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[miscz]

IANA3DGFXET (I Am Not A 3D Graphics Expert Too) but I've seen some recent video cards benchmarks and high amount of video memory helps performance at high resolution and with anti-aliasing. For example GeForce 9600GT with 512MB of RAM and 8800GS with 384MB are pretty much the same in terms of performance but at higher resolutions there's some noticable difference.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point! Why is this news really? It's inevitable that in the arms race (which is, let's be honest a thing every hardware manufacturer will compete in (what choice do they have?)) that's computer hardware (lovely distraction). The only pity is that the cutting-edge is basically wasted on game which are basically point the cursor (gunsight) at some enemy (who cares what they are but if you left-click at the right time they die and you score points.

I love FPS's but I have to admit that it is slightly disturbing that all this cutting-edge technology is being used to effectively brainwash us to kill. Isn't this strange? Can we not use this amazing technology for something better?

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[JoshJ]

Civ4 takes me about 3 hours to play a single game to space race/diplo/cultural victory, are you sure the issue isn't with your strategy? Standard civ4 without mods doesn't really take all that long between turns, though things like Rhye's and Fall or that WWII mod that come with BTS have truly massive between-turn lengths (and the latter has turns that take ages due to the sheer number of units involved).

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Hurricane78]

Just that the resolution of the framebuffer and the textures are two entierly different things.
The framebuffer, even at 2048 x 1600 x 48 bit uses a ridiculous 18.75 MB per frame... out of 2GB? That's nothing.
The rest of the memory gets used for textures, vertex data, normals, and so on... so you have to have color, normal, bump map, and specular reflection information, just for one texture. Then a mip map of everything. For large textures you can never have enough graphics memory as long as the chip can render the textures. Main RAM is useless for this. Just try an onboard graphics chip with memory sharing. Huge PITA.
Shaders are not even worth mentioning in terms of graphics memory. Code is usually the tiniest part.

Main RAM on the other hand holds mainly the word data, sound files, textures that are preloaded but not used yet (think GTA) and other game data like model data used for game calculations.

And: Yes, IAIGD (I am a game developer).

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Kamokazi]

It's preying on the uninformed...a 2GB care is surely better than this pithy 1GB card...

And I worked at CompUSA during college...I saw GeForce 4's with 512MB...*shivers*

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But the headlines says "World's First 2GB Graphics Card Is Here", not "World's First 2GB Consumer Graphics Card Is Here", so how was he supposed to know?

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Koiu Lpoi]

The Oblivion Texture Overhaul, with everything on highest, will be eating up at least 2 GB of video ram. Crysis be damned, this is the true test of video hardware.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The memory could be used as a RAM disk under certain conditions. Very fast and availabile under most conditions you would have a gig or more unused for Video!

http://www.360mobileoffice.com/documents/MBI-presentation.ppt#12

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[CelticWhisper]

Heard of that. Personally I'm waiting for psychotropic filtering. That oughta be a lot of fun.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[petermgreen]

but I believe AA (anti-aliasing) is after processing to a scene
There are a number of ways to do anti-aliasing but IIRC the common way is to oversample, that is generate the output in a higher resoloution than will be output and then downsample it.

If you have a 2560x1920 monitor and oversample by 4 times in each direction you would be generating in 10240x7680. That would mean you would need over 300 megs just for the output buffer. I'm not sure if current cards could handle that at a reasonable framerate anyway though.

Afaict the big thing putting pressure on graphics memory is texture detail, if you double the horizontal and vertical resoloution of your texture you quadruple the memory required to store it. Ideally you want enough memory on your graphics card to store all the textures the game uses on the card. Texture detail is something the game developer can fairly easilly allow the user to alter, just design the textures in the highest resoloution and allow those with weaker hardware to select downsampled versions.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[anexkahn]

Or if you want to do folding @ home :)

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[ratboy666]

2560x1920, 4 bytes per pixel, 2x oversample X and Y, needs 78MB
2 screens for double buffering, 156MB
1 screen for off-screen rendering, 234MB.

Giving the equivalent of 24 screens worth of textures in 2 GB.

Nope, still overkill: I would imagine that a 512MB card would be a bit stressed (just a bit light on textures), but workable.

Still, build it and they (may) come...

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[petermgreen]

I doubt this would work with this card at least not to give the full capacity.

That technique relies on the graphics card ram being directly mapped into the processors address space, then it simply uses a standard linux block device to expose it for storage purposes.

There is no way a 2GB card is going to be mapping it's entire ram into the 32 bit PCI address space, there just wouldn't be the room on most machines. It could map it in the 64 bit address space but then operating systems which don't support addressing memory beyond the 4GB boundry (such as the 32 bit versions of client editions of windows) couldn't access it.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[dreamchaser]

Of course they'll come. They came when there was text only. They came when you had a simple tiny framebuffer. They came when you got VGA, then when SVGA and VESA arrived they came as well. They came when you had T&L. They came when you had vertex and pixel shaders. They came when cards got 512 megs for a standard high end one.

They will come. Two gigabytes is overkill today, but in a year or two it won't be.

I can also see some serious scientific uses for such a beast.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The games are designed around people with 512MB at the high end."

Yea if you're stuck in the 90s.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[LarsG]

Let me guess. You just ordered one and are trying to justify it?

Honestly, this 2 GB of RAM is much needed these days.

Which games? Show me at least a single benchmark that shows that a current 1GB card is short on ram on game settings that a 4850 can realistically run at.

"Great, my video card I have enough video ram to run this game at top settings but the gpu is too slow to give me a decent framerate".

That some (*cough*many*cough*) of you automatically insult people who would buy this wreaks of ignorance, jealousy, pomposity, and an attempt to justify your own languid situation.

No, we are pointing out what should be blindingly obvious; this card isn't balanced. It is like a PC with 2GB ram and a Pentium 75.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Emb3rz]

"The majority of people" still do not have internet. For such ones, it's doubtful that playing games less than 3 years old is a prime concern.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Molochi]

What? Limit my swap to a mere 4GBPS? Pshaw...My RAMDISK will do double that!

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[RedShoeRider]

"Me, I can't see the value of getting a card with more than 1GB, even for future games."

Neither can I! Just like I can't see computers ever needing more than 640K of memory.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Godji]

when Will Wright teams up with John Carmack

Create your very own mindless zombie alien hovering ball of goo that shoots acid thing, and unleash it against the unsuspecting online community! Design your very own oversized ultra new tech nuclear powered futuristic double barreled organic biorocket launcher weapon and fight against hordes of the deadliest community-created horror creatures. Battle with your aim against others' wit in the first ever MMOFPS in history: S I M Q U A K E

Hm, I was joking but that sounds like something I would play! DAMN YOU Slashdot for giving this idea to a guy who is not the CEO of a game developer house!

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Floritard]

when Will Wright teams up with John Carmack

Just imagine the sort of penis monsters one could create in id Tech 5. Scary.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Godji]

This sounds like a RAM issue more than a video card issue. I've played Civ 4 well on a very old laptop with 32mb of dedicated video memory. But it did have its RAM bumped up to a gig.

However, you MUST apply all the Civ 4 patches. Unpatched Civ 4 runs like pre-release Vista with the debugging symbols still in - it's PAINFUL. Not that I would try that, but it must be painful* :)

I hope that helps.

* this is a Slashdot mod bait. Because Slashdot hates Microsoft, a helpful post with bad geek humor in it that also bashes Microsoft must get modded up into nirvana. Get to work.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[joeman3429]

If only there was some way to utilize all this extra video card power for distributed scientific computing.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[fm6]

A don't think a lot of gamers (or other consumers) will want this. A more typical application would be visualization. SGI still does business in this area. Eventually, commodity computers will drive them out of this business, just as they did the workstation business. And fancy graphics cards that fit in standard PCIe slots is part of the reason.

I suffer from memory shock on a daily basis. I work in the x64 part of Sun, and I got into a friendly argument with a SPARC guy about whether our half-terabyte server is better than their.

On the downside: just upgraded my tablet to 4GB, only to discover that Win32 can only handle 3 of them.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[cliffski]

Don't forget that if you need a 2 gig card, you likely have authored 20-30 gig of textures in your game.
Who did that?
Fairly well paid texture artists. And that pushes the costs of the game into the stratosphere. Games could have 1 guy doing textures back in the DOOM era, but now, if you want to have a shiny new FPS, and you are assuming 2 gig video cards and 20 gig of textures, then that means huge budgets.
huge budgets means fewer games, cross-platform games dumbed down for the most popular console, and game design dumbed down for the lowest common denominator.
I'd prefer games had some variety, took advantage of each platform, and stuck to lower production requirements personally...

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[tooler]

Haha, I had to click the 1 Reply just to see if someone made this joke.

I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[default luser]

I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well.

That's exactly what I meant. You can attach all the memory you want to a video card, true, but there is a limit to how much you can conceivably use.

When you use more memory, you use more memory bandwidth; this is an undisputable fact. If you double the resolution of textures in a scene, the texture memory bandwidth you need to render that scene doubles. If you double your resolution, the amount of framebuffer writes doubles.

Since memory bandwidth is finite, you can only add so much before it becomes worthless. This is why the 2GB would be FAR MORE useful on a DDR5 card like the 4870, or else the GTX 280 with a 512-bit memory bus.

Don't get me wrong; the 4850 has just enough memory bandwidth to perform efficiently in it's current configuration, and I like it so much I bought one myself. But anything above 1GB on the 4850 will be wasted, because you cannot magically increase the bandwidth.

Heh, you don't have to tell me that we'll always need MORE MEMORY. My first 3D accelerator featured an amazing 4MB of memory! But along the same line as above, I wouldn't have put 16MB of ram on my first card, because it would have been worthless with the limited 64-bit bus.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you could go for 4 cards, that would get you 8GB. There are a few MB's out there that have 4 x16 pci slots. Eventually they will have an 4GB, 16GB, etc.. version until we start thinking of GB's like MB's and TB's become the new GB's... then what. If I can go to the used computer shop and get a card with a bunch of fast ram on it for cheap because it sucks for the latest games, then well why not. lolz I do remember working on a SGI back in the day that had 12 MIPS R4400 cpu's each with 4mb of cache, and about 48 i860 for gfx... was accessing it with an Amiga over a lan.. and thinking, I could almost fit my entire 52mb hd into the cpu cache. More is better imo unless your trying to make small and cheap.. high end gfx cards are neither.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[petermgreen]

I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well.
Indeed it's all very well having a lot of graphics memory but unless the other aspects (features ,graphics processing power, bus bandwidth etc) are equally ahead of thier time it won't be much use.

Plus buying high end PC stuff just for future proofing doesn't make much financial sense IMO. Cheaper to buy enough for what you require now an what you think you will need for the next year or two

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[abstract daddy]

We didn't have 512 Mb cards in the nineties. Right now 512 Mb is what most gamers seem to have.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[blair1q]

larger textures, more textures, more vertices, more shapes

in other words, instead of the creepy, highly replicated graphics of today, you will be able to have more realistic, highly entropic graphics tomorrow

at least, for the short time before it all changes again and the world starts raytracing depth-shaded ellipsoids in realtime

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[daybot]

Great for the pointless eye-candy first-person shooters. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

Yeah. I ran Quake 2 on my MacBook Pro for the first time yesterday. Even with most of that next-gen pointless eyecandy I get 327fps from the demo1 timedemo! I'm saving up for an SLI system though so that I can have enough power to play with cl_particles 1 at a reasonable framerate.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[game kid]

Meh. I'm saving my money for DoomSporeCraft: Episode 3: Source Online Game of the Year Edition, the MMOFPSRPG with the deadliest community-created horror creatures from South Korea. It'll be addictive (and so time-consuming, you'll never leave home for that job interview!).

Just think...turn-based headshots...sexy human-alien-elf hybrids with skin displacement maps and hardware breast physics...nuclear rocket launchers with onboard Steam Friends list access! It'll make your head spin and your videocard RAM heatsinks melt to goo.

(Now that I think of it, DoomSpore does sound like some sort of badass Middle-Ages plague...)

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[anilg]

IANA3DGFXET (I Am Not A 3D Graphics Expert Too)

IANALNBWAAATEIKNIP (I Am Not A Logic Nazi But Writing An Acronym And Then Expanding It Kinda Negates It's Purpose.)

YMMV.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Fri13]

First computer start processing game, what loads needed (set from settings) menu graphics in the 3D card memory and run GPU process those as you have set from settings. When you move to game itself, game orders OS to move graphics to 3D card memory on quality what was set on settings. When the graphics are on the 3D card memory, GPU can start processing it and showing stuff to your screen. Then it is about GPU how fast it can draw actions and VRAM how fast it can feed the GPU with the texture and other graphic data. If you don't have enough VRAM, you GPU needs to wait CPU to transfer them from RAM and it starts slowing down the whole process and game starts looks jerky.

Same thing is on the CPU RAM Swap. If you have heavy process what eats your RAM, rest of needed RAM is taken from virtual RAM, swap. This makes things lots of slower and it does not help if you have over powered CPU because you dont have enough RAM. That's why first thing to speed up computer, is to add more RAM, if you run out it and swap is needed to use, but if enough RAM is free, then you need to change to faster CPU what can process the data. But there is third "ring" too, the bus between CPU and RAM. If you have too slow bus what does not allow fast enough data to be transferred between CPU and RAM, it does not help if those two gets overpowered.

Now add for that a 3D card what process the graphics and is responsible for drawing only the graphics (in future, physics too(?)!), while the CPU and RAM does the Physics, Animations, AI etc etc. If 3D card does not have enough VRAM so the GPU cant draw graphics as fast it could, it gets slower. If you have lots of VRAM but slow (old) GPU, it cant draw so fast if scene is complex, or use effects what GPU cant draw itself as HW, but needs to emulate them or drop off.

Thats why you have settings in game where you can order game to tell the OS what kind data needs to be loaded to memory, so the balance of VRAM/RAM and GPU/CPU gets right and the drawing is smooth, in expensive of the quality.

More VRAM > better textures / more textures loaded to very fast memory > better speeds for GPU to store rendered stuff.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Jac_no_k]

I've ran into excruciating waiting for the next turn when playing on a custom Huge world with the maximum number of AI. I was on a machine with only 512MB of ram so it was swapping quite a bit. Upgraded to 2GB of RAM and while the wait between turns much shorter at 30 seconds, as the game gets into the later stages, it gets slower.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a real job!

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[JoshJ]

You know, I haven't played much on the larger maps (outside of the Earth map) mainly because I find it utterly tedious to play- even if you get ahead of the AI in techs, it's an outright hassle to try to do anything other than space/culture victory. Conquest/Domination is so painfully tedious it's ridiculous.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Nyall]

well here's how it works on the embedded GPUs I work with.

with 64 bits per pixel you have, red, green , blue, alpha, z buffer, maybe a stencil buffer or an accumulation buffer. it depends on what is needed.

however when it comes to multiple buffers each buffer is not 64 bits... The front buffer that is being clocked to your screen only needs the red, green, and blue values. (24 bits per pixel) the other items that where used to generate the front buffer (z buffer, stencil...), can now be used again for the ongoing rendering into the back buffer. So the back buffer can be 64 bits, the front buffer isn't.

(and to be precise alphas also stay with the front buffer, so the front buffer is 32 bits despite only 24 being sent to the screen)

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Nyall]

Oversampling by 4x in each direction would result in 4*4 = 16x FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing).
The oversampling method for FSAA is usually 2x in each direction.

When you hear about 16x anti aliasing they are not referring to FSAA. They are referring to coverage calculations. Lets say you draw a black line on a white background. For each and every pixel that black line touches the GPU is going to estimate how much of that pixel the line covers. If the line covers the pixel 100% that pixel becomes black. If it is 50% then the the GPU does weighted averaging of the existing color with the black line. For the case of black on white that results in gray.

So why does this '16x' anti aliasing method even have a number like 16 in the name of it? You would think that the coverage calculations would be very precise and result in very exact weighted blending, (EG the black line covers the white pixel 28.45%, the resulting pixel is going to be 28.45% black and 71.55% white) The reason is this kind or precision is not doable in real time. So you consider the pixel to have 16 sub points inside of it. The gpu checks if the line touches each sub point, and for every one that it does that pixel just got an extra 1/16th darker.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[xouumalperxe]

My napkin math was simply meant to illustrate how "higher resolutions" hardly have an impact on video ram, so I decided to assume a worst-case scenario. Thanks for the explanation, though (that pretty much confirmed my suspicions on how it'd work).

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I will. I will be an ACR. An Anonymous Coward Raper. Slashdot accepted my application yesterday. I will drive around the country with the contact addresses of you and others, acquired from your friendly phone companies,

and first I will rape you in all seven holes of your body. Yeah, you heard me right. And yeah, the gender does not matter. Then I will stick my feet so deep into your ass, that a part of my ass is in your ass. And then I'll make a splits. BAM. Tadaaaa...

Bottlenecks?

[Squapper]

The article mentions that too little video memory can be a bottleneck. But wouldn't squeezing 2 gigs of memory on a graphics card simply move the limiting bottlenecks elsewhere?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Applekid]

But wouldn't squeezing 2 gigs of memory on a graphics card simply move the limiting bottlenecks elsewhere?

Well, sure. No matter how good your gaming rig is there's always going to be a bottleneck. And if it's an older game that runs 200 fps at full detail, then the bottleneck is the game itself capping maximum poly/texture counts (ie. the detail itself).

But the whole point of having and maintaining l33t gamer systems is to continually shift that bottleneck somewhere else which is also farther up the scale of performance so you keep getting a better gaming experience with each iteration.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[eebra82]

The article mentions that too little video memory can be a bottleneck. But wouldn't squeezing 2 gigs of memory on a graphics card simply move the limiting bottlenecks elsewhere?

I understand your question, but the whole point is that sometimes a game can be sluggish only because there is not enough memory and not even remotely close because of core performance. Today's games and the future brings us more games that utilize all the extreme amounts of memory, which ultimately results in greater textures and more variety.

But to answer your question: there's always going to be at least one bottleneck, but by adding more memory, at least they raised the bar a bit. Not that today's games are going to run much faster with this, but upcoming titles will.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Bibz]

Maybe, but if it was the bottleneck, then the "new" bottleneck will be less restrictive than the memory was.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[larry bagina]

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You beef up the weakest link. The chain still has a weakest link, but the overall strength is raised.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[qw0ntum]

Maybe, but you've eliminated this one... There's always going to be a limiting factor somewhere, you've just reduced the effect that too little memory will have.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Archangel Michael]

There is always a bottleneck, somewhere.

If you want to call it that. Otherwise, I call it the weakest link in a chain, which seems more appropriate, because bottleneck implies substantial slowdown at a single point along the way, where a weak link indicates something that could be improved, but otherwise is functional.

At some point, all the graphic eye candy and having 50K FPS refresh at 8000 x 6000 is pointless. Unless you're playing in a holodeck, that is.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[El Gigante de Justic]

Yes, it could, unless you're running a 64-bit OS and processor. Most computers, which are 32-bit, have a total or 4 GB of addressable memory space, which includes video memory, sound card memory (if you actually still use one) and system RAM. Therefore, if you put in a 2GB video card, you can't make use more than 2 GB of system RAM.

The 4GB address limit is probably the best argument for why we should see more progression to 64 bit computing, but there isn't yet enough demand in the market to force the issue for at least a few more years.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[snarfies]

Couldn't you make that same argument for EVERY component? If your CPU is the biggest bottleneck in your computer, and you replace it with a shiny new one, then something else (your 1 gig of RAM, what have you) will become the biggest bottleneck.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[EricR86]

Not that today's games are going to run much faster with this, but upcoming titles will.

I'm not entirely sold on that point. I'd imagine that developers already try to throw as much rendering information into the card's memory as-is allowing for the "overflow" to be stored in system memory. But I would imagine this process is done transparently by the driver anyway (AFAIK). Removing this "overflow" for most current games could improve performance by the same amount as any other newer games that come to market.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, your max ram would be less than 2GB. The processor, hard drives (think DMA) and other devices take up RAM addresses.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[qoncept]

Sure, but isn't that how performance is improved? Through removing bottlenecks one at a time?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't read too much into it. I believe that this tweak was motivated by the marketing heads and has absolutely no solid technical background to begin with. It was a marketing manoeuvre targeted at those potential clients who believe that 2x is always assuredly better than 1x, specially in bragging rights.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[mikael]

Not really. The graphics card has 800 stream processors all running off cached texture memory to cached framebuffer memory (deferred rendering). Instead of simply fetching pixel data direct from texture memory and writing it directly out into framebuffer memory, the graphics card will maintain a texture cache (the current textures being used), and a framebuffer cache (the current area of the framebuffer being rendered). Then when there is no more pixels to be written, the framebuffer cache is written back into the framebuffer.

There is no upper limit on how much texture memory needed. For many applications like volume rendering with floating point data, the only limit is the amount of texture memory available.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[mmkkbb]

Most computers, which are 32-bit, have a total or 4 GB of addressable memory space, which includes video memory, sound card memory (if you actually still use one) and system RAM. Therefore, if you put in a 2GB video card, you can't make use more than 2 GB of system RAM.

Why would these devices' memories be mapped directly into system RAM?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[the_humeister]

I think that's just how things are setup. Kind of like how video memory used to addresses at $a000:0000 on DOS machines. That 64KB block of memory couldn't be used for anything but video access on systems with a VGA card.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Geekner]

They are not directly mapped to RAM, this is simply a limitation of 32bit computing. All devices need addressable memory space, including video RAM, and the total 32bit limit (4GB) is split among these devices. When a driver accesses the device, it preforms a call to that devices memory address and the device responds. When the OS runs a process, it is copied into the system ram using the same kind of address.

Imagine a city with a limited road budget. The industrial areas (devices) have priority over residential areas (system RAM), so some residential areas are left without road access.

This is why there is an average usable limit of 3-3.5GB of RAM in most 32bit systems. You can have 4gb of RAM, but the system still needs to allocate space to the other devices so it can interact with them. This also has to do with DMA, direct memory access, that enables devices to directly access ram (bypassing the CPU) to make Input/Output operations faster.

Thus, 2gb, even 1gb, video cards are quite useless until 64bit is the norm. Any game that would require 1gb of video memory will most likely need more than 2gb of system ram, as history has shown relating video memory to system ram requirements in games.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Firehed]

It's just the nature of the architecture. It's why my 32-bit dell laptop only has 3.5GB of addressable RAM where my MBP has its full 4GB, and why systems with beefy graphics subsystems and 4GB often only show 3.25GB. This card is well past the point where it's counterproductive on a 32-bit system for exactly that reason.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the older game runs at 200 fps at full detail, the bottleneck maybe just the link used to connect to your monitor or the refresh rate of the monitor itself.

The bottleneck is there, but the problem is either:
1. A braindead owner forcing a game to run at a frame-rate higher than his screen can display.
2. A braindead developer that does not cap his game to the refresh rate (and sync with it, btw)

You will be amazed at how many "gamers" do not understand this.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing shared video/audio memory with dedicated video memory on a device. I have 4GB of system memory with an nVidia GTX 280 1GB, and every bit of my 4GB of system memory is addressable. If I were to run a

Re:Bottlenecks?

[miscz]

What imaginary gamer it is? I have yet to meet one not satisfied with game dropping to 50/59/60 frames per second. I have yet to see a game that doesn't have vertical sync with display as an option but you seem to live in a fantasy land where GPU can always keep 60 or even 30FPS so that it does not fall automatically into 15FPS during more intense moments.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

If video memory 'overflows' old data is simply overwritten, nothing is saved into system memory. If you need this destroyed resource for another frame render the data has to be loaded again into video memory and the frame render is stalled. More memory essentially reduces the chance resource has to be reloaded every render pass, in practice giving more performance due to less stalling.

The point eebra states is that most games use engine schemes like loading everything into memory at the start of a game/map not during rendering then limiting total map size at say 512 megabyte. This way the delay of frames rendered because of resource reloading is totally circumvented.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[allaunjsilverfox2]

I know its insanely non-standard, but I know gentoo has a article on how to map graphics memory as system ram from the kernel. http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Use_memory_on_video_card_as_swap A potentially interesting idea since the stream proccessors could help offload some heavy compiling. Of course, I could be wrong and fully expect my flogging.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[rawshark]

well, duh, there will always be a bottleneck, I believe it follows from the Well Ordering Principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-ordering_principle

Re:Bottlenecks?

[mmkkbb]

Imagine a city with a limited road budget. The industrial areas (devices) have priority over residential areas (system RAM), so some residential areas are left without road access.

I get that. I have a CE degree, so no need for analogies :)

What I am getting it is, wouldn't the video card have a single address that the processor writes to?

This is why there is an average usable limit of 3-3.5GB of RAM in most 32bit systems. You can have 4gb of RAM, but the system still needs to allocate space to the other devices so it can interact with them. This also has to do with DMA, direct memory access, that enables devices to directly access ram (bypassing the CPU) to make Input/Output operations faster.

None of these have anything to do with address space. A DMA buffer isn't device memory mapped into system memory; it's a buffer in system memory that is copied to or from device memory.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[mmkkbb]

That article gives you instructions on how to use your video card's RAM like swap or a RAM disk, but not system RAM.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[petermgreen]

That is of course assuming that they mapped all 2GB of that video ram directly into system ram. I find this unlikely given how common 32 bit operating systems still are.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Zencyde]

If we treat performance as a pipe, the bottleneck will be the thinnest point in the pipe. There will always be one. Though, the easiest way to improve total performance is to expand each bottleneck. That was a pipe analogy. Anyone up for tackling this with a car analogy?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[NerdyLove]

I know Counter-Strike 1.6 for one gets a bit more glitchy with VSync on. I always force it off and let my gpu render 100fps.

I think other games get a bit glitchy with it on, also.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Geekner]

Ah, sorry for the mistake. I wasn't sure about DMA at first, took a quick look at wikipedia and understand a bit more now. As for the shared addressable space, I'm obviously no expert, but it seems to be an oversight during the design of 32bit x86 processors.

As the old saying goes, "Nobody will need more than 640k of RAM", they probably never saw as far ahead enough as to recognize this issue.

Of course, the x86_64 architecture should have become standard sooner. Microsoft is trying to force this now, with 64bit Vista (see Vista logo compatibility requirements). Although they should have at least pushed harder for XP64 support.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[mmkkbb]

they probably never saw as far ahead enough as to recognize this issue.

no, I'm guessing the tradeoff is very well understood. You trade off memory capacity to make a DMA buffer. Having a 64-bit address space will not fix this, as you are actually using physical RAM for storage of data while it is being copied to or from the video card by the DMA module.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Bruce Dawson]

They don't map the whole 2 GB in to your address space. They typically map in the video card RAM through a 256 MB window, so a video card with more memory doesn't use more of your address space. So, with a 2 GB video card and a 32-bit OS you would still have access to up to 3.0-3.5 GB of RAM.

Then again, a game that can justify a 2 GB graphics card will need a huge amount of RAM, and it is absolutely time to be running a 64-bit OS. I run 64-bit Vista on all four of my computers (home and work), and installing a 32-bit OS now when memory is so cheap seems very shortsighted.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[DrFalkyn]

The 4GB address limit is probably the best argument for why we should see more progression to 64 bit computing, but there isn't yet enough demand in the market to force the issue for at least a few more years.

I recently upgraded my desktop(well it turned out being an entirely new system, except the case and peripherals), and you actually have to try to build a 32-bit system. You can get a 64-bit CPU and motherboard for under $150 easily, and 64-bit Vista/XP is not any more expensive than the 32-bit versions. Its long past due that developers starting optimizing their apps for 64-bit systems, especially for games - the card I bought was $170 and it was probably a mid-range card was the most expensive item in the system. But the newer games like Mass Effect and The Witcher are requiring the newer cards. (Mass Effect would not even on run on my older system) They may as well require a 64-bit system as well

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Geekner]

I fully agree, x86_64 is merely a stop-gap effort to avoid the memory-size bottleneck. What we really need is a better architecture.

Unfortunately, there are huge difficulties faced in completely changing architecture on the consumer level.

I'm afraid I'm a bit out of my league here, so I will leave the discussion to the experts.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, sound ram and video ram are not used quite that way. There is a window into the graphics ram that for any card I've seen is no larger then 128MB on the best system I've seen. The window is moved around to fill the graphics ram. Same for sound cards only a smaller window. The 2GB limit on 32bit systems is a OS limitation(and can actually be increased to 3GB using a boot.ini switch). The other 1-2GB is used by the OS to run.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if he's being intentionally funny...

Re:Bottlenecks?

[droopycom]

Ignoramus:

This didnt mean that your video card could only have 64MB of memory. How about its just a 64MB "window", that you can map to any portion of your 2Gb memory ?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[droopycom]

Ignoramus:

Since Pentium PRO, all the 32-bits intel CPU can address 36-bit of Physical Memory...
Also, 8 bits processors could address more than 256 bytes and 16 bits processors could address more than 64K.

Your CPU doesnt need to have mapped access to ALL the device memory any more than your CPU need to have mapped access to the whole content of your hard drive.

If you can use a 4Gb memory stick, why could not you use a video card with 2Gb memory ?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful...?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[petermgreen]

There is no reason why the total memory on a card has to match the total address space used by the card. It is one way to design a card but far from the only way.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[petermgreen]

You can get a 64-bit CPU and motherboard for under $150 easily, and 64-bit Vista/XP is not any more expensive than the 32-bit versions.
Last I checked with XP it was slightly more expensive and with vista you had to send off to MS to get the 64 bit CD unless you bought ultimate.

Also i'm not positive but I have a feeling you are supposed to buy two licenses if you want to have both installed simultantiously (with XP you certainly need to as they are totally seperate editions of windows with totally seperate key systems).

Re:Bottlenecks?

[mmkkbb]

So it sounds like you also think that things like disk caches are sub-optimal. You are welcome to that opinion but there are easier performance targets.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[codergeek42]

Yes, it could, unless you're running a 64-bit OS and processor. Most computers, which are 32-bit, have a total or 4 GB of addressable memory space, which includes video memory, sound card memory (if you actually still use one) and system RAM. Therefore, if you put in a 2GB video card, you can't make use more than 2 GB of system RAM.

That's not entirely accurate. PAE makes it possible to address 4+ GB of addresses on a 32-bit system, so long as your operating system supports it fully. AFAIK both Linux and BSD happily do, and certain Windows versions also support it.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 4GB address limit is probably the best argument for why we should see more progression to 64 bit computing, but there isn't yet enough demand in the market to force the issue for at least a few more years.

XP needed lots of memory. Vista needs more. Wait for Windows 7; it'll require a metric fuckload of memory, so 64-bit computing will be quietly ushered it.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Lost Engineer]

I can see how having 2GB of video RAM on a 32-bit system would be useful. You just put the whole game in video RAM so you don't have to swap stuff in.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm... no...

Modern OS's don't map the entire video card memory 1-1 into the 4 GB address space. The OS communicates with the graphics card through much much smaller buffers and DMA data transfers. The idea of knocking a 2 GB hole in your memory space is pretty laughable. Because of the way Windows divides the address space into 2GB for the OS and 2 GB for the application, it's impossible that there's even a contiguous 2GB range to map it into.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[sander]

Neither the sound card memory nor the memory on the graphics processor - appart for the small amounts that are in the pci area for configuration and control - are directly addressable by the processor and most certainly don't count against any 32bit limit. If one wanted to, one could easily create a "swap" device that made use of unused graphics memory (not sure why you would want this, but you could none the less). Anybody having any kind of sound output still has a "sound card" and its memory requirements (and presence in the address map) are by and large not determined about it being a discrete card or part of the chipset.

Bizzare that the parent would be rated "Insightful"

Re:Bottlenecks?

[DrFalkyn]

Check out newegg http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=368&name=Operating-Systems Vista Home Premium 64-bit and 32-bit are the same price, $109.99. I got my version (64-bit) for $99.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno... given 24 fps is enough to give full motion in a movie...

100 fps should be enough for everybody. :)

Grammar Nazis, man your stations!

[Anonymous Coward]

> from the way-too-much-overkill dept.

AKA, the recursive tautology dept.

you have no idea

[unity100]

the 'eye candy' in that 'the pointless eye candy first person shooter' term of yours becomes SO real that it boggles your mind. i dont like fpses. but then again, that kind of graphics, makes some fpses worth playing.

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont like fpses. but then again, that kind of graphics, makes some fpses worth playing.

And that right there sums up the problem with the gaming industry. Game producers don't even need to worry about whether their game is any good simply because some people will play it just because it's shiny (unity100, I'm looking right at you).

Re:you have no idea

[Jasonjk74]

i dont like fpses. but then again, that kind of graphics, makes some fpses worth playing. And that right there sums up the problem with the gaming industry. Game producers don't even need to worry about whether their game is any good simply because some people will play it just because it's shiny (unity100, I'm looking right at you).

That's one of the easiest ways to be modded +5 insightful on /., just complain about games with good graphics not having any creativity. What about the games with bad graphics and bad gameplay? The two are not mutually exclusive. Games are a visual medium, they are supposed to look good.

Re:you have no idea

[Torvaun]

How about games with good gameplay and bad graphics? Those exist too, and they are better than games with good graphics and bad gameplay.

Re:you have no idea

[Jasonjk74]

How about games with good gameplay and bad graphics? Those exist too, and they are better than games with good graphics and bad gameplay.

Here's a novel concept: developers should strive for both graphics and content! That's just crazytalk...

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

pong looked like ass and it started a revolution.

Re:you have no idea

[msormune]

Uh no. Only those interested in the shiny graphics will buy/download the game, but the real money lies elsewhere, meaning the game has to be good. Just about all the big hits don't have superb graphics, just superb gameplay.

Unfortunately it's rather difficult to create games like Diablo, Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft every year, and get the players interested.

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

They are suppose to look good, but they are also suppose to have fun game play to.

If people go out and buy games that suck just because they have good graphics, then what incentive does the game companies have to create fun games.

You are right, people should not buy games that have bad game play and bad graphics either. However, I doubt this is less of a problem than people buying crappy games with good graphics.

Re:you have no idea

[Machtyn]

However, pong was top of the line graphics for its day.

Re:you have no idea

[khellendros1984]

I would disagree rather strongly that WoW has particularly good gameplay. I tried it, and I only found the same repetitive trudging as in every other MMORPG. It's being able to play with friends that makes it any good, and WoW isn't even *close* to alone in being able to do that.

Re:you have no idea

[JynXed]

Sorry, what's the problem exactly with the gaming industry? Game producers are producing games for which they know they have an audience? Is it really so wrong to enjoy a game because it looks really, really, ridiculously good? If you don't support these games, don't buy them. If enough share your view then you won't see these games as much, that's just the way that the market works.

Re:you have no idea

[Project2501a]

replying to undo moderation

Re:you have no idea

[Culture20]

I still play games with good gameplay and bad graphics. I toss aside games with bad gameplay but good graphics.
To game company CEOs, this translates as: "Customer Culture20 occasionally buys games with bad gameplay, but good graphics. We need more of these games for him to buy because we make more profit when he buys multiple crap games and plays them as little as possible."
They don't want me to play the games for years and years. They want me to get bored and buy the next shiny thing.

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because something is top of the line doesn't make it good. Pong's gfx are very simple and definitely crap by today's standards, but the game was great and got people to think.

"Pong was the first video game to achieve widespread popularity in both arcade and home console versions, and launched the initial boom in the video game industry." - Wikipedia

Was just giving an example of good game play with bad graphics.

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

No it wasn't, it was designed to be cheaply mass-produced. Even back then, computer graphics were rather better than "pong". Just not at that price point.

Re:you have no idea

[lymond01]

And that right there sums up the problem with Apple's entry into the hardware industry. Apple doesn't even need to worry about whether their system can run any relevant apps or even produce a viable right-click because some people will buy it just because it's shiny (Macbook Pro, I'm looking right at you).

Fixed.

Re:you have no idea

[xtracto]

That's one of the easiest ways to be modded +5 insightful on /., just complain about games...

That is one of the easiest ways to be modded +5 interesting on slashdot, just complain about someone getting modded up for making an ontopic karma whoring.

Re:you have no idea

[boyko.at.netqos]

I was going to point out the endearing nature of retro arcade classics, but I thought about it - Ms. Pac Man still has damn good graphics because it illustrated the main points clearly and decently.

Yes, it was terribly abstract, but not a pixel out of place. You knew the ghosts were ghosts, the maze walls were well defined, and a cherry, despite the low pixel count in a sprite, looked like a cherry.

There was quite a lot of thought put into Ms. Pac Man's graphics, and it shows.

Re:you have no idea

[sa1lnr]

Funny, one of my all time favourite games Ecstatica II didn't look particularly good even for its time. I wasted hours playing through that game.

Re:you have no idea

[sabre3999]

I emphatically agree with you. Give me a good game of C&C or Gears of War with a buddy over the incessant grinding of the popular MMOs any day.

Even better, how about a unique single-player experience? System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are some of my all-time favorite games... They aren't considered some of the best games ever based upon their graphics (*cough* Crysis *cough*)

Re:you have no idea

[lgw]

WoW had fantastically good gameplay in areas that you overlook - it's very easy to learn if you've never played an MMO before, and it's very easy for a casual player to get addicted to (until the single-player content runs out).

This is wht WoW has 10 million subscribers: Blizzard took the same repetitive gameplay as every other MMO, and made it accessible to the casual gamer. The game much simpler in gameplay, and vastly better un usability, than its competitors.

Re:you have no idea

[cliffski]

I disagree.
Paintings and photos are a visual medium. Even movies have sound too. Games have sound AND interaction.
I play games to interact, not to see pretty things. If I want pretty, I can watch Revenge Of The Sith, or Lord Of The Rings, Or Naked Women.
Games don't compete even vaguely with Hollywood in terms of graphics. They will always be many years behind due to being real time.

But hey, feel free to prioritize graphics, it means that reasonable video cards for the rest of us become dirt cheap :D. Late-adopter FTW.

Re:you have no idea

[jgarra23]

Games are a visual medium, they are supposed to look good.

My kids & I love playing 20 questions in the car :) No sight required.

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience game companies try and make original games with strong enough stories and content that squeals can be created. So yes they do want you to play that title for years and years. Graphics card companies continue to push the envelope of what can be done with $500. Most of the work in creating games is making the game playable on today's hardware. Crysis is a good example of a game that really pushes today's hardware at full quality mode. You can scale it back to get better fps or you can get a better gfx card/computer. Crysis is made in a way that will let it stay on the shelf and still provide outstanding gfx for several years. By the time Crysis is playable on your standard office computer, the next great thing will be out to replace it with even more realism and bling.

As for old games, if enough people still play, most companies will still support them. I still play Starcraft online, and Blizzard still updates it. Starcraft has pretty good graphics tho for a 10 year old game. Need more minerals.

Re:you have no idea

[Oktober Sunset]

Why is it that anything other than the newest and most awesome graphics is considered bad, 4 years ago, people were tossing off over HL2 and Far Cry, which could easily be playing on a 256mb Radeon 9600, now just 4 years later, the graphics are considered bad. Not just lower detail, not just not as good, but graphics must go straight from best to bad as soon as something slightly better comes along. Its the same with video too, everyone declared DVD as awesome quality, when it replaced VHS, now everyone is denouncing it as totally shit, not just less good, but its shit, and we can't bare to watch it with all its nasty lo def blurryness, or course 4 years ago, it was amazing and crisp and awesome, now it's utter SHITE, and watching it make us all want to puke, and of course everyone claims they thought it was shit all along and hated it.

Strangely this isn't the case with music, everyone declares the current medium to be shite almost straight away, cds? shite, vinyl? shite, tape? definatly shite.

Re:you have no idea

[mpeskett]

If I had mod points I'd be clicking the little mod-point-giving dropdown thingy by now.

Anyone else feel like doing that on my behalf?

Re:you have no idea

[hairyfeet]

I don't know about that,sometime bad games can be good cheesy fun. I'll probably be razzed for this, but I liked Terra Wars. Most of the reviews I saw hated it for the lame graphics,but I think it makes for some good cheese. The acting is as bad as any Ed Wood flick,first game in ages I actually giggled while I blasted. For me,all I care about is did I have a good time playing it. Yes the graphics are lame and the acting is so bad it's funny, but while the game is total cheese,for me it was good cheese,not government cheese. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:you have no idea

[Jasonjk74]

That's one of the easiest ways to be modded +5 insightful on /., just complain about games...

That is one of the easiest ways to be modded +5 interesting on slashdot, just complain about someone getting modded up for making an ontopic karma whoring.

Too bad you'll never be accused of being interesting.

Re:you have no idea

[WDot]

Why is it that whenever a shooter comes out with beautiful graphics, it's considered garbage, unimaginative, and "the reason PC gaming is dying?" People cry on message boards saying "Why release a game that requires a $2000 PC to play?" They say that their computer has a Geforce 3 still and if developers aren't going to cater to that, then fuck them.

Instead of imagining that PC gaming is in a sordid state, try this:
1. Go to some online electronics boutique and pay the $150 for a midrange video card that'll handle any modern game well. Make sure to check whether your motherboard has an AGP or PCI-Express slot, and buy accordingly.
2. Hang around some gaming websites like Destructoid and see what games interest other people. Find one that interests you. Buy it.
3. Install and play it. Discover that this isn't the 90's and that playing on "medium settings" doesn't mean everything looks like a muddy blob.
4. 2 years down the road, exercise self control and DON'T buy the latest video card. That's right. Just because a new generation of video cards comes out, doesn't mean you NEED to upgrade. You might be surprised to find out that new games will still run great on your old card!
5. Feel great knowing you're not just some whining tool who bashes a hobby that he doesn't know anything about.

P.S. Who the HELL do you talk to that bashes Half Life 2 because of the graphics? That game, like its ANCIENT predecessor, is still highly revered because of its storytelling techniques and finely tuned gameplay, not because of how many gigabytes of textures it had.

Re:you have no idea

[Draek]

The problem with that philosophy is that it drives the costs of making games *way* up, eventually creating a market where only big companies like EA are able to compete, and anything that's not a sequel is considered 'a risky investment', utterly crushing the chances of independant developers of going mainstream.

Re:you have no idea

[GigaplexNZ]

What about the games with bad graphics and bad gameplay?

What about them? No-one cares about them. They get ignored completely such that no-one bothers to dignify them with a complaint about one particular aspect.

Re:you have no idea

[Draek]

I'd agree that games are supposed to look good but the problem is, how do you define "good graphics"? personally I define it as "it preserves a distinct artistic style throughout the entire presentation", but many people seem to define it as "how many polygons does it use for the main character".

For example, just to pick two old games, which one do you think has the best graphics, Castlevania 3 for the NES or Syphon Filter for the PSX? me, I'd take the former, since as much as I enjoyed the latter, it's graphics always gave me the feeling that they had been created by three different teams and then shoved together in the final product. Yet, the technology it uses is much superior to that of the NES, being 3D vs basic 2D.

So, it all depends on how you define it, and for those who define it the same way I do, criticizing developers for focusing solely on pushing more polygons instead of worrying about the gameplay is a perfectly valid complain, since for us all we're getting is higher system requirements, not better graphics, and certainly not better games.

Re:you have no idea

[NaishWS]

I remember thinking Mario Kart 64 had great graphics, would I say that now? Hell no. The reason being is that you compare it to what is out there at the moment. Humans have a ranking system, if there is something better than the current best, then that gets moved down, until it has moved so far down it isn't even worth considering and is ultimately 'shit'. When the first car was created it was thought of as fast, now you watch an episode of top gear and whenever an old car is used it is basically laughed at. It is a natural cycle.

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

I don't think the poster was complaining about that exactly, it is a pretty natural progression. He was complaining about last gen always being lambasted so much, when in fact it's still passable.

I agree with him - I buy some of my movies as blu-ray and some as DVD, depending on whether they're just a drama, comedy, action movie, documentary, etc. Eventually I'll be buying everything in HD as the prices come down, but at the moment I consider DVD very adequate for most movies. Especially compared to the Standard Definition stuff that I get on my freeview box, it looks awful on a full HDTV.

Actually, in the past I've noticed that once a film gets started I don't even tend to notice the medium it's using anymore. For example I've re-watched some old Disney or Star Wars videotapes and eventually just got wrapped up in the story and hardly even noticed the crappy hissy sound quality (which I take much more umbrage at than low-res graphics).

Disney are still only getting around to releasing movies on DVD so that they can milk as much money as possible out of people buying all the different versions, it's pathetic. I was going to criticize the Star Wars movies of the same, but I've just noticed that it is due out 'soon', but it remains to be seen just how long that will actually take.

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

Meow! Better watch where you poke your overinflated ego, you might end up hitting something pointy.

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

I bought Farcry just because people were making such a big deal about the graphics and I wanted to see if my system could handle it. Not gonna be doing that again.. well, not until I forget the valuable lesson at least! I also bought a game called Devastation way back when which had nice graphics and okay physics, but still pretty boring. Since then I've not bought much for the PC apart from Half-Life 2 and a few racing games. One of my friends is getting all excited about Diablo III and wants me to try out Diablo II with him online, but I cba with PC games any more, I like sitting in front of my HDTV (which will take PC input, but why bother if I need to buy a GeForce 8/9 to drive it adequately) with my PS3, which I expect will be able to play Diablo III quite acceptably (whereas this friend who has a PS3 as well is now thinking about buying a new PC just for playing Diablo III :/ )

Re:you have no idea

[mdwh2]

It ought to go without saying that by "good/bad", people mean "better"/"worse". Obviously these are relative terms, not absolute ones. Furthermore, the OP didn't even mention "good" or "bad".

Its the same with video too, everyone declared DVD as awesome quality, when it replaced VHS, now everyone is denouncing it as totally shit, not just less good, but its shit, and we can't bare to watch it with all its nasty lo def blurryness, or course 4 years ago, it was amazing and crisp and awesome, now it's utter SHITE, and watching it make us all want to puke, and of course everyone claims they thought it was shit all along and hated it.

Not at all - it's a case of, why would I buy something inferior now that something better is available? Do you really think that video producers should release on VHS instead of DVD, because they shouldn't be striving for something better?

Re:you have no idea

[mdwh2]

It's not a "philosophy", it's the market.

If people choose games with better graphics over games with poorer graphics, then those games will sell more - that's life. Sure, a philosophy where graphics didn't matter would make life easier for developers, but then we'd have games which people didn't demand as much. Personally I think it's better for a market to product what people want, and not what is easy to produce.

But there's another issue: it may be that plenty of people do like games with older graphics, but there is less money to be made because supply is far greater: both in that you are competing against old games, as well as a competing against a larger pool of freeware/indie game developers.

Basically cost of game development has gone up, because that's the only real way to make large amounts of money. There was a golden age where a smaller pool of developers could make money from games that took a few weeks to write and had rubbish graphics. But things now are better for the user: if you like good graphics, it's good, but even if you don't, games with poor graphics can be found much more cheaply, or even for free.

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

Disclaimer: I currently have a Macbook Pro, and have owned several Macs throughout my life, as well as IBM compatible PCs (which I suppose technically Macs are these days anyway) running everything from Windows 3.11 to XP as well a few different Linux distros, several Amigas, a Commodore 100, and other little handheld computer devices.

Couldn't you come up with something a bit better than 'no right click' and 'relevant apps'? Relevant is highly relative. You can tell from the same root for the word. A lot of people (including me) find that OSX is all they need for a home PC. Some lucky people also find that it's all they need for work too. I actually find the right click method on my Macbook more convenient than having a separate button, and just find it a PITA using other laptops now, because you need to move your whole hand to get your thumb over the second button, rather than just dropping a second finger onto the trackpad and doing a normal click.

Personally, my only problems with the Macbook Pro are: Overheats if you put the graphics card back to the clock speeds that ATI actually designed it for and play a 3D game for more than an hour; no docking port.

To me it sounds like you've never actually used a Mac for any length of time and are just sticking with the standard moronic Mac complaints. Just in case you're wondering, things like the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone don't interest me, but I'm happy they are successes as that means more cash for Apple to continue developing their computers and OS.

Re:you have no idea

[Spazntwich]

It probably has a lot to do with the people trying to convince themselves that their shiny new product was worth buying.

Re:you have no idea

[Jasonjk74]

Meow! Better watch where you poke your overinflated ego, you might end up hitting something pointy.

Pointy like your head?

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

Yes. My head can be defined as pointy, if pointy means 'oval'.

Re:you have no idea

[lymond01]

Looking back on an old post, thought I'd respond to you.

I don't have a problem with the Mac OS persay -- I like that it's UNIX-based...much more stable than anything after 7.1 or so. I've been supporting and using Macs since 1996, and was there when NT 4.0 rolled off the shelves as well.

From a business perspective, OS X is lots of eye candy, and while the dual-fingered trackpad is nice (and will likely be adopted by other manufacturers), the single-button desktop mouse remains inferior to multi-button mice. Working in an academic institution currently, my most frequent request from Mac Users: Install Windows so I can continue my research.

Anyway, my biggest problem with people who insist on buying Macs is the money they spend. Many will waste an extra $500-$4000 of taxpayer money to get the shiny case and large icons...then turn around and spend another $100 on Windows XP to be installed, not with Parallels or VMWare, but with BootCamp, thereby negating the best feature of the Mac, its secure OS. And don't get me started on the lack of advanced centralized administration...

I have problems with all the OSes, from Slackware to XP to MacOS. I just don't feel I should be paying a 25% premium to have those problems.

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

I can agree with all of that, though I personally have no experience administering Mac OS so don't know what is available. I have just been running boot camp myself while I'm at work, don't really have any need to be running Windows and OSX at the same time, though I run pure OSX 100% of the time at home now, I can still use VPN and remote desktop which is all I need to check up on things remotely (and in fact I did just that this morning when someone contacted me saying they were having issues).

Better definition than real life.

[HungryHobo]

Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?

Re:Better definition than real life.

[Squapper]

That's more about the stream processor's ability to render complex shaders efficiently, than it is about the video memory.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[Daryen]

Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?

The short answer is, no. The explanation is as follows:

From what I understand after reading a bit of Wikipedia, the human eye doesn't have a "resolution" like games. You'll notice that you can see more of things that are closer than of things that are far away. Therefore we have angular resolution which is more accurate towards the center of our field of view, and closer to our eye. According to Wikipedida that is:

50 CPD (1.2 minute of arc per line pair, or a 0.35 mm line pair, at 1 m).

In addition, I think that the number of colors we can "see" vastly exceeds what current monitors can render, although IMHO we have already exceeded (using only 6 million colors) the noticeable difference between one color and another. I'll grant that it is still entirely possible that a higher number of colors could look more "real" even if we aren't able to directly distinguish between 1/6,000,000'th of a difference in color in the same sense that 120 fps looks better than 60 fps even though we aren't able to count the frames.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[feedayeen]

Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?

We already have more than enough to do that. We need better level of detail algorithms so we stop wasting the processorsâ(TM) valuable time rendering those leaves 27 miles away.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[plasmacutter]

that's not a limitation of computer hardware, but of the game designers' effort and time.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?

The short answer is, no. ...
50 CPD (1.2 minute of arc per line pair, or a 0.35 mm line pair, at 1 m).

That looks like math to me. ;)

Re:Better definition than real life.

[mikael]

The human eye has about 100 million rods and cones. You need a 100 megapixel framebuffer (around 10,000 by 10,000 pixels to achieve this.

There was an article in the Independent newspaper about Virtual Reality a long time ago. In the article, one of the researchers stated that photorealistic quality was defined as 80 million textured triangles/second.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[coresnake]

How many triangles/second are we at so far?

Re:Better definition than real life.

[Firehed]

Define "fool". I can look at my 10MP photos and be more than aware that I'm not looking at the actual landscape. It's not due to a lack of detail; probably mostly a function of the display medium. The same holds true for movies at the theatre - there's no lack of detail, but you can still tell that you're not looking at an actual scene (and disregard bad acting). 24FPS is way too low, even 60FPS probably won't cut it - not due to choppy playback, but because real life doesn't have a framerate (or it's at some sort of quantum/fourth dimension level; stop being argumentative).

But hell, you could have a card with no memory if the bus it to which it's attached has the bandwidth.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[ceoyoyo]

We must be over 80 million by now. A Voodoo card could do a few million. Looks like that metric isn't used anymore, but a GeForce 2 can do 40 million.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[tomhudson]

Since we have 2 eyes, you'll need to at least double that ...

Re:Better definition than real life.

[kvezach]

You could give it 1 TB of memory and it wouldn't help, since the problem isn't with the memory. In order to do something approaching reality (let's disregard the issues of gamut for now), you're going to solve the rendering equation much better than current cards do - perhaps by using Metropolis light transport or photon mapping, or if you really want photorealism, spectral rendering. It's going to be a loong time before that can be done in realtime, and it's hard to say what the memory requirements would be (use of textures? compressed textures? Or just raw reflectance data?).

Re:Better definition than real life.

[Cyberax]

Fairly close at about 150 millions of textured triangles/second :)

However, lighting, shadows and REAL textures cut that down to about 10-20 millions.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[hr.wien]

Well it depends on the resolution, but Crysis renders between 1 and 2 million triangles every frame and my HD3850 can do around 30 FPS at 1280x800.

Peak throughput with passthrough shaders and no state changes is much higher though, but obviously that isn't very interesting in the real world.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[tehcyder]

Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?

I think having to build a monitor that would curve all around you and stretch to the horizon and also up into the sky to the limit of visibility would be more of a problem than the memory on the graphics card.

A much more informative link..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.powercolor.com/eng/NewsInfo.asp?id=259

That's cool but...

[The Living Fractal]

The R700 has dual GPUs on a single board, competes very well with nVidia, and here's the really cool part: It has nearly TWO BILLION transistors.

Re:That's cool but...

[fr4nk]

Somehow I don't think that those two billion transistors will be cool.

Re:That's cool but...

[AndrewNeo]

So, it's hot!

Re:That's cool but...

[The Living Fractal]

What with the jet engine fan cooler ATI cards come with, they're going to be cool alright. Now.. quiet? No. But when someone asks you why your computer just got really loud you can tell them "That, my friend, is the sound of power."

Finally

[Rinisari]

I can finally do the Explode open/close window Compiz effect on my 10 MP display!

Huh

[colmore]

I'm still rockin 512 megs and doing fine - main system I mean. Integrated graphics.

The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive.

This kind of reliance on jet-powered hardware kind of insures that the game is going to be all megacorporations working from market research.

Re:Huh

[decipher_saint]

Game development will always have room for the little guy, as long as he is making fun games.

Re:Huh

[cowscows]

There's nothing that a small group of programmers could do back then that they can't do now. It might be a little harder to stand out amongst the crowd, particularly if the crowd that you're most worried about is the big gaming magazines/websites. But you can still throw together a good game if you've got the time and the talent.

The tools do seem to lag behind the hardware potential a good bit, but they continue to improve and even individuals who dabble in this sort of stuff as a hobby can have access to some pretty cool stuff to help them make a game. Sure, it's probably not feasible to build your entire game ground up from scratch, but I doubt even the biggest companies really do that anymore.

There is plenty of room in the market for smaller games. If they're fun, word will get out, and people will play them.

Re:Huh

[erudified]

I tend to agree with the other poster who mentioned Counterstrike.

I'll take it a step further, though, and say this: I believe game development by mom & pop shops is about to enter a golden age.

High quality open source engines like Cube 2 (as well as many others) and a greater emphasis on procedural content generation (I give it a year or two before high quality open source libraries for this are available) will enable small developers to take advantage of these (somewhat insane!) hardware capabilities. You don't need ridiculous poly counts to have great gameplay, the Wii has proved that beyond any doubt. The open source world is very well equipped to provide small developers with huge sets of textures and models under licenses (e.g., creative commons) that will enable awesome things that we can't even imagine yet. I believe we will end up with more open gaming platforms as a result of these developments.

In short, no offense, and maybe I'm just an optimist, but I think you're 100% wrong ;)

Re:Huh

[kabocox]

The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive.

Um, come on games like Jewel Quest will always be more profitable and easier to create than Final Fantasy or heck next Mario game. Look at Tetris and solitaire games at the other big examples.

Re:Huh

[Jasonjk74]

I'm still rockin 512 megs and doing fine - main system I mean. Integrated graphics.

The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive.

This kind of reliance on jet-powered hardware kind of insures that the game is going to be all megacorporations working from market research.

Another example of the easy way to get modded +5 insightful trend: Graphics technology is supposed to advance. I can't believe all the luddite sentiments I read here on /. If the news were that some open source developer is utilizing 2GB video cards and a bunch of games were coming to Linux (as if that will happen), everyone would be applauding all this innovation.

Re:Huh

[xgr3gx]

Case in point - Urban Terror 4. Free, opensource game based on the Quake3 engine.
It's fun, looks great, cross platform, and doesn't require heavy duty hardware to run it.

Re:Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two ways to get games for these things. The first way is as you describe, the second is to leverage the various open source technologies that are available...

Re:Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Urban Terror isn't open source.

Re:Huh

[transfixed]

I don't know if this makes sense, but the way I see it, we need better tools: vast libraries of stock art that can be freely modified, general purpose game engines (i.e. the same one can be used for fps/rts/rpg/whatever games) that can take advantage of the latest hardware as it becomes available with minimal changes to game specific code, etc.

I mean, where do all the costs go these days? Are these big blockbuster games made from scratch every time or what??

Re:Huh

[westlake]

The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive.
.

I don't see economies in art design and modeling.

You might not be producing for Pixar and IMAX projection. But you are still building characters, props and stage sets. You need the background artist, the specialist in visual effects.

You need someone who understands the texture of cloth, grass and tree, fur and flame and water.

You need someone who understands movement and expression. Art and animation were never easy or cheap even when games were as low res as Monkey Island or The Dig.

Re:Huh

[ahoehn]

Yes, these advances will bring about more Crysises, but there are some real alternatives. As much as I love to hate Microsoft, the Xbox Live Marketplace is a wonderful "little game" delivery tool. N+ and a host of other titles available in that medium prove that there's still room for little developers to make great games and release them to mass audiences.

Steam seems to be is the best current PC equivalent, offering little brilliant games like Audiosurf alongside its "Nasa sized engineering project" games. And then there's instantaction.com, great (mostly) free (as in beer) little multiplayer games, taking flash to a whole 'nother level.

So yes, some games will always require the latest and greatest hardware, but there's also been some promising developments on the little-studio game distribution front.

Re:Huh

[rastoboy29]

Nah.  Throw in incompetence and delusions of grandeur, and even a one man game can still use plenty of resources.  See my sig.

Re:Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still rockin 512 megs and doing fine - main system I mean. Integrated graphics.

So um.... do you play games?

Impressive!

[cashman73]

With graphics cards like this, Duke Nukem Forever will be damn good when/if it comes out! :-)

Re:Impressive!

[Anonymous Coward]

My only concern is that it goes to 11.

"FIRST" 2GB card? Err...

[TK2K]

Workstation cards have been multi-gigabyte for ages! the ATI FireGL V8650 which was released a while ago is 2GB.

Re:"FIRST" 2GB card? Err...

[linzeal]

This just shows how much Slashdot is geared towards software engineers. Mechanical engineers like me have been playing with 2 gigs of video memory since the Onyx 3000. Honestly though 2 gigs of memory would be pretty sweet I use a Firegl 7300 series sometimes and it still lags with some of the more complex assemblies I've tinkered with.

UNIX did it a decade ago

[Imagix]

Didn't the Silicon Indy (or was it the Onyx) have a 2 GB video card? Glancing over the specs, the SGI Onyx4 could have up to 8 GB of graphics memory. Note that these machines are on the order of a decade old.... Granted, not exactly home gear, but still this isn't the "World's First 2 GB Graphics Card". So in fine tradition... another thing that UNIX had already done 10 years ago. (Hmm... maybe it was closer to 15....)

Re:UNIX did it a decade ago

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Didn't the Silicon Indy (or was it the Onyx) have a 2 GB video card? Glancing over the specs, the SGI Onyx4 could have up to 8 GB of graphics memory. Note that these machines are on the order of a decade old.... Granted, not exactly home gear, but still this isn't the "World's First 2 GB Graphics Card". So in fine tradition... another thing that UNIX had already done 10 years ago. (Hmm... maybe it was closer to 15....)

IIRC the Onyx with the RealityEngine2 could have up to 2 Gig. I do remember the InfiniteReality could have 2 Gig on board.

PC technology, bringing 10 year old technology to today.

Re:UNIX did it a decade ago

[the_humeister]

Uh, more like bringing those technologies mass produced at a somewhat more reasonable price today. Those Onyx cards cost as much as a car back then.

Re:UNIX did it a decade ago

[Culture20]

That's because there wasn't "graphics RAM" on SGI machines, it was all tweakable system/graphics RAM. Not a bad setup; much faster than the shared RAM systems we get today on x86 motherboards with built in graphics. Even their SGI Windows NT4 boxes had that hardware setup.

Re:UNIX did it a decade ago

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because SGI went for the low volume, high margine, rather than the high volume low margin. It killed them.

Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'll be able to play Duke Nukem Forever on my Pentium II!

Market need?

[electrosoccertux]

Is there any market "Need" for this, to be able to play your games better, or is this simply filling the "uber-leet-most-money-I-can-spend" market?

Re:Market need?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any market "Need" for this, to be able to play your games better, or is this simply filling the "uber-leet-most-money-I-can-spend" market?

Sure, better higher definition textures for one. To quote TFA:

Memory size makes a great impact on performance, even a powerful GPU can suffer from bottlenecks due to slow and insufficient video memory. The more the memory buffer, the more the data graphics can be saved - thus eliminating the need to access system memory and providing faster graphical performance. To satisfy the latest and upcoming games requirements, PowerColor PCS HD4850 2GB can fulfill high video memory request of those games and delivers high throughput for interactive visualization of large models and high-performance for real time processing of large textures and frames, enables the highest quality and resolution full-scene anti-aliasing

Re:Market need?

[GreatBunzinni]

Clearly yes. There are a lot of people out there who are very willing to spend large amounts of cold hard cash to outdo the joneses, even when their "one-up" doesn't make any sense at all. This product is intended to supply the e-penis market instead of any concrete technical need.

Re:Market need?

[Anonymous Coward]

Need: Workstations dealing with large CAD or photoshop files on large displays. Especially the CAD, though.

Re:Market need?

[Spatial]

You're right. Even Crysis is happy with 512MB at even the highest detail levels, up to a respectable resolution like say, 1680x1050. Even at 1920x1200 I'd say 2Gb would still be far in excess of the requirement.

Another demographic it might appeal to is the 'higher number equals better" crowd who might pick it up in a store on impulse.

My issue with cards like this is that, by the time a game comes around which actually needs 2GB of onboard RAM, the card will probably not have the raw performance to play it at a reasonable framerate at settings that would actually utilise the resource. I'm pretty sure it's not the first of its kind either; there was a 256Mb Geforce 6600, etc.

Re:Market need?

[cryptodan]

Is there any market "Need" for this, to be able to play your games better, or is this simply filling the "uber-leet-most-money-I-can-spend" market?

Sure there is, and the market is the My e-Penis is bigger then yours cause I got 2Gigs of VRAM on my video card :)~~~

Re:Market need?

[mr_mischief]

That's a good thing. The more early adopters of gee-whiz, big-dollar, high-margin cards like this there are, the more cash the companies have for operations. The more cash they have from the cutting-edge market, the more they can crank up production runs on cheap mainstream cards at lower margins.

IOW, the people who buy this card as soon as it comes out are subsidizing your next video card purchase if you're not one of them.

Re:Market need?

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently, the latter.

After awhile, it'll be a minimum requirement for checking email.

Re:Market need?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sick high def 3d email.

Re:Market need?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any market "Need" for this, to be able to play your games better, or is this simply filling the "uber-leet-most-money-I-can-spend" market?

What about the whole HPC crowd?

Re:Market need?

[jmakov]

What about the whole HPC crowd?

Not a soothsayer

[wild_quinine]

But in all honesty, the number of games released each year for the PC that *require* a card like this to run at high settings can be counted on one hand. I'm pretty sure that didn't used to be the case.

I am not a soothsayer here once again to predict the death of PC gaming (once again). The PC is still a wonderful platform for development, flexibility, versatility, and complexity when compared to the consoles. Games will always keep coming for the PC, and not just MMOs, but all manner of wonderful things.

But I will say this: things aren't looking great for the hardware.

The recent nose dive in all but the very highest end card prices tells an interesting story, I think. The relative dearth of genuinely triple AAA graphically intensive titles tells another. The slow uptake of DX10, the slow uptake of Vista, the pissweak 'Games for Windows' label, and the smaller shelves in retail stores, as everything goes online...

This hardware is not required.

Re:Not a soothsayer

[Spatial]

the number of games released each year for the PC that *require* a card like this to run at high settings can be counted on one hand

Nope! Even limbless amputees can hand-count that figure.

Re:Not a soothsayer

[dave420]

That's funny. The PC games industry (which is essentially all Windows gaming) is expanding by billions of dollars per year. Just because it's not running on Linux doesn't mean it doesn't exist :)

Re:Not a soothsayer

[mr_mischief]

As soon as I can use a mouse and keyboard of my choosing, check my email between rounds, patch the problems in the game, play with 64 other people simultaneously, browse the websites of my favorite gaming clans between games, talk to my teammates with my voice using the headset of my choice, edit a spreadsheet after the game, program the device myself between games, mod the games to my heart's content, download all the homebrew games I want, and swap out the parts when they fail or I want better performance, then I'll play just console games. It's a different market. Deal with it.

Re:Not a soothsayer

[wild_quinine]

As soon as I can use a mouse and keyboard of my choosing... then I'll play just console games. It's a different market. Deal with it.

I'm fine with the way things are. I wouldn't give up my PC for anything. Some days I think I could just about go over to linux full time, but it's the games that draw me back.

But it used to be the case that the PC led the way for developers, and games were ported to the console. Since that process is increasingly occuring the other way around, and finer detail is not often added for the PC, the extra graphics hardware is wasted in many releases.

Re:Not a soothsayer

[joeman3429]

Personally I wont be happy until my rig has the power to run an AI, which is intelligent enough to design a better version of itself and then construct it using a built in 3d printer, and then repeat. How much ram does *that* require? Hmm?

What were they thinking?

[SirLestat]

From TFA: "even a powerful GPU can suffer from bottlenecks due to slow and insufficient video memory" ... but they decided to use GDDR3 rather than GDDR5 and use HD4850 rather than HD4870. Way to go !

Re:What were they thinking?

[ifrag]

I was expecting to see the 4870 as well. That was a bit of a shock. Unfortunately there are actually people who are not as knowledgeable who will think that more RAM on the video card immediately equates to better performance.

Whenever I tell someone I got a new video card the first question out of their mouth is usually "how much ram does it have?" as if that's all that matters. There is still a lot of people out there who don't bother thinking about all the other variables and just focus on that one statistic because it's one that is usually included in the title of the card.

Re:What were they thinking?

[Colonel Korn]

Go look at Powercolor.com. There's a 4870 version with GDDR5 as well. The Slashdot poster just chose to post about the strange lower end uber memory part.

Re:What were they thinking?

[mikael]

There's a guy in our work who is working on advanced lighting models (BRDF, BTF). He grades graphics cards by the amount of texture memory and the number of texture units available divided by the cost of the card.

My

[Anonymous Coward]

flash drive has more storage. Wake me up when we get 2GB of L2 cache.

Re:My

[AndrewNeo]

Can your flash drive transfer anywhere in the gigabit per second range?

Re:My

[brxndxn]

You can be assured of one thing... When processors get to 2gb of L2 cache, whatever Windows version is out then will need more.

Re:Wow..

[Tim C]

I bet that this thing would have enough power to run all the AERO stuff in vista.

Jesus, my ex's laptop runs Vista with Aero effects turned up to maximum with no problems and a crappy NVidia mobile GPU. This stupid "Aero eats your resources" meme needs to die.

By all means whale on MS, but at least do it for the right reasons.

Wolfenstein

[Nerdposeur]

Finally, I will be able to play Wolfenstein 3D in all its beautiful glory!

Re:Wolfenstein

[Anonymous Coward]

Poser!

Who cares about "Wolfenstein 3D"- the original Castle Wolfenstein is going to *fly* on this puppy!

Re:Wolfenstein

[Loadmaster]

Hell, I just plugged one of these bad boys in and then popped in--you guessed it--Zork. Man, this card is so bad ass I have to take speed reading classes just to keep up with the awesomeness. And talk about sharp text! Watch out, yo, that shit'l cut ya it's so sharp.

Crysis?

[sanosuke001]

Can it run Crysis?

32-bit address space limitations

[Spatial]

We're really beginning to feel it now. With this card, you're limited to around 1,750MB of RAM on a 32-bit Windows system; 4GB minus the 2GB on the card, minus all the other mapped stuff which amounts to 250MB on my computer.

In summary, I for one welcome our new 64-bit overlords...

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[bucky0]

Graphics card memory won't be normally addressable with regular CPU opcodes, would they? You have to manually pipe data across the PCI/AGP/PCIe busses to make it to the card. They certainly don't sit in process address space.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[Shados]

err, Vista Ultimate is capped at -128- gigs of RAM, thank you very much. And even if it was capped at 8, it would be enough for a 4 gigs + this card setup.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[mrtonic]

You remember incorrectly.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_vista

Home Basic is capped at 8Gb, Home Premium at 16Gb, and Ultimate and Business at 128Gb

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[raijinsetsu]

I stand corrected. Vista Home Basic is capped at 8gb, and Ultimate at 128mb.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[Macthorpe]

Actually, Home Basic is 8GB, Home Premium is 16GB, and the rest are 128GB.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[MostAwesomeDude]

The framebuffer is typically memory-mapped. While it's possible to program a video card just through indirect DMA and the GPU's command processor, most systems need to map the framebuffer for part of startup, and generally there's no reason to unmap it.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[Planky]

128mb? No wonder Vista runs like crap!

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[bucky0]

Fair enough, I hadn't thought about that. But a hypothetical 3000x2000*32bpp framebuffer takes up ~170 megs of ram. A more reasonable framebuffer of 1024x768 takes up 25 megs. Neither of those are anywhere close to the 1.75Gigs the GP was talking about. Texture memory isn't memory mapped (excluding space for the AGP window)

First Wii reference.

[twitter]

It's funny how little hardware is required to make playable games. The Wii, for example, gets buy with an 800 MHz PowerPC and 88MB of RAM and 24 MB for the GPU. More is always better, but sooner or later it's going to be overkill.

Re:First Wii reference.

[Macthorpe]

Whether a game is playable or not is irrelevant to this particular debate - if you want games to look better, or better-looking games to run faster, then you need more power.

I can't believe I have to actually explain that.

Re:First Wii reference.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you think you're helping but you are doing nothing more than A) being freaking annoying and B) turning me apathetic. Are you sure YOU aren't this "Twitter" fella?

Re:First Wii reference.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how few letters are required to write "by".

Re:First Wii reference.

[JCSoRocks]

Wii is fun but its graphics are less than impressive. The only wii games I play are console-exclusive titles like Zelda. For any other game I just get tired of the graphics looking subpar. When you get used to playing games like Crysis and BioShock the Wii just looks silly.

Re:First Wii reference.

[Anonymous Coward]

800mhz is a lot more powerful than the NES I used to play duck hunt with, but truth be told I'd rather play Call of Duty4.

Maybe playability has nothing to do with this debate.

Re:First Wii reference.

[Mattsson]

But 2GB memory on a graphics card today feels a bit useless, unless you're into high resolution medical imaging.
The card isn't powerful enough to require 2GB if you want playable speed.

Maybe if you could use that RAM as an application cache in, say, Windows... =)
BTW, wonder how this affects a 32 bit system. Should bring maximum system RAM down below 2GB, since those only have 4GB address space.
Would make it even more useless to have a card like this. =/

Re:First Wii reference.

[Mattsson]

It's funny how little hardware is required to make playable games.

Yeah. We had playable computer games in the early 80's. Hardware is almost irrelevant as long as the game-designers are good.
But nice graphics, good sound and appropriate controllers usually makes a good game better.

Pointless

[Teejaykay]

What's the point with 2Gb of GDDR3, or even 1Gb in that price segment? Even a 512MB HD 4850 is good enough for the people most likely to buy it (aka people with no fancy, high-resolution wide screen TFT monitors) -- it's certainly good enough to play stuff at at 1280x[whatnot]. (Yes, hello, it is I.) In that range, with this card, I'd wager the bottlenecks'll just be elsewhere; the CPU, the RAM, heck, maybe the GPU's memory bandwidth. Even if the GPU were the source of the bottleneck, just get a HD 4870 than this, really.

It's nicely marketed, of course, much like selling Doc Legit's Miracle Snake Oil, which'll put hair on your head again, cure your hemorroids, caffeine addiction and make your keg into a six pack again. :P

Re:Pointless

[miscz]

With the prices of LCD displays today I'm really looking into a GPU with overabundance of RAM. I have seen some 24" Gateway for about $500 (in Poland, so that means it includes 22% VAT and higher praces for everything), and it wasn't just crappy TN matrix, it was S-IPS. Other manufacturers will soon follow, I guess so it's just a matter of (relatively little) time when 1920x1200 becomes popular.

Re:Pointless

[JCSoRocks]

Screen size has nothing to do with how much Video RAM you want. You're storing textures in that memory. The more memory you've got the more textures you can store and the higher resolution they can be. Being able to max out the texture detail in a game makes a huge difference in appearance.

Also, you'd be surprised what a difference just a graphics card upgrade can make in frame rates. Maximum PC ran an article a while back where they upgraded some old machines... if I remember correctly one of them got something like a 70% FPS improvement from a new card.

Re:Pointless

[Teejaykay]

Screen size has nothing to do with how much Video RAM you want. You're storing textures in that memory. The more memory you've got the more textures you can store and the higher resolution they can be. Being able to max out the texture detail in a game makes a huge difference in appearance.

To clarify: I was referring to those TFT screens that tend to have a max 1280x[whatnot] resolution in any case, not necessarily larger screens. If I don't have need for resolutions higher than that, then I would wager I do not really need a whole lotta video RAM. A smaller amount of GDDR5 makes far more sense in that situation than an overabundance of GDDR3.

Also, you'd be surprised what a difference just a graphics card upgrade can make in frame rates. Maximum PC ran an article a while back where they upgraded some old machines... if I remember correctly one of them got something like a 70% FPS improvement from a new card.

I wouldn't be too surprised! Still, even today it sometimes (strangely enough!) comes down to the CPU or RAM being the limiting factor, but it isn't necessarily the hardware's fault...

twice on the frontpage. great!

[quitte]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/14/1646211

No GPU will ever need more than 640k of ram...

[Anonymous Coward]

Right?

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

By all means whale on MS, but at least do it for the right reasons.

Clippy, Bob, Windows Media (WMV/WMA), PlayForSure, Xbox and Xbox 360 (both failures, in design and profits), Zune, Windows ME, Windows Vista.

Moving the bar

[Shivetya]

and I for one am glad to see products like this all the time. While I may not buy them they do move the bar further which usually brings the the lower range items down from the stratosphere in pricing.

I remember people clearly harping about cards with 32mb, or 64, or oh god no one will ever need 256.

Look at how much more resolution today's and tomorrows displays are bringing to us, then turn and realize how much memory it takes to address all of that.

Re:Moving the bar

[tomhudson]

I remember people clearly harping about cards with 32mb, or 64, or oh god no one will ever need 256.

Look at how much more resolution today's and tomorrows displays are bringing to us, then turn and realize how much memory it takes to address all of that.

2560x1600 display, 32-bit color = 16,384,000 bytes. (16 meg)
2650 x 1920 display, 24-bit color = 12,288,000 bytes. (12 meg)

In other words, even those really nice 30" displays don't "need" 256 meg of ram, never mind 2 gig. What they do need is high internal clock rates.

Re:Moving the bar

[BrentH]

The size of a framebuffer at the desired size has _nothing_ to do with how that frame actually got there: being rendered by a dedicated chip with memory. Estimating memory usage for 3D applications by looking at the size of the framebuffer is like looking at at your 80x25 terminal and concluding that 16kByte of ram is enough for pretty much any process you want to run. A graphics card's memory takes loads of textures and other sorts of data to actually compute the contents of that framebuffer, not merely storing it.

Re:Moving the bar

[tomhudson]

Only for games and certain other applications - not for writing a document or coding or surfing the net. Most apps are fine with a lot less video ram.

Re:Moving the bar

[BrentH]

You're forgetting that certain other applications are including almost all other applications these days. Composition manager like Vista and OSX use and Compiz like a bit of video memory too. True, they (should, ahem) require not so much as 2GB's, but you can tell the difference between 32MB and 256MB if you're doing more than using a terminal.

Re:Moving the bar

[tomhudson]

You're forgetting that certain other applications are including almost all other applications these days. Composition manager like Vista and OSX use and Compiz like a bit of video memory too. True, they (should, ahem) require not so much as 2GB's, but you can tell the difference between 32MB and 256MB if you're doing more than using a terminal.

[X] "If I wanted "wobbly windows", I'd wave a magnet at my CRT, you ignorant clod!"
[X] "640 meg will always be enough"
[X] "In Soviet Russia, compositing managers manage YOU!"
[X] "Mmmm, yummy Windows, 300% more textures"
[X] "You can have my terminal when ..."
[X] "We can now render the BSoD at 20,549 FPS"
[X] "With these, we can more accurately picture global warming - and with the power they draw, we'll encourage global warming"
[X] "Yes, but does it run linux?"

I know someone who just *had* to have a 1-gig video card when they first came out ... still hasn't found any advantage to it over the smaller card ...

Re:Moving the bar

[BrentH]

Even with an old game like Doom3 you can notice the difference between a 512mb card and a 1GB one, so let alone current titles like Crysis.

And also....

[DrYak]

where the memory requirements are much higher (3D modelers and the like).

Also medical imagery (specially volumes, like MRI and CT).
And GPGPU (using Brook+) to perform complex calculation on huge datasets.

Re:And also....

[JoeKilner]

Also there is a lot of work currently going on in free-viewpoint video / image based rendering which requires large amounts of memory.

So this kind of advance may well be heralding a new age of 3D video.

10 guesses as to which industry will be the first to fully exploit that...

Re:what a load of drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

That was 9 years ago. Can you name anything as successful(from such a small team or limited resources) since? I think you just proved the OP's point.

Re:Wow..

[sdpuppy]

Well, then maybe some of that memory could be assigned for use with running programs and we can call it "Shared Video Memory"

uh, yeah it's been done before, but the other way around.

What is really driving this...

[TK2K]

I would venture to say consumerism is not the driving force. As far as I understand it, the vast majority of graphics tech is a pushed from the top down. Let me explain.
Workstation cards have always been more powerful than consumer cards due to the nature of their work. Often the consumer version is simply just a toned down version with baseline functions removed.
So in short, this is trickle down tech from the professional market. They're releasing them because they can make money at it, and because there IS a demand for it.
In the old days computers were tools, then they were tools with fun stuff on them. Now we have a whole category of people referred to as 'computer jocks' who instead of buying an expensive car and driving it through campus blow money on computer related stuff even though they don't need to.

Re:what a load of drivel

[thedak]

Counterstrike was also developed 9 years ago. "Cruise ships are massive projects requiring robotics and the workforce of a third world country" "Where was the titanic developed?" Yeah.. it was 9 years ago, not exactly a perfect example.

And maybe....

[DrYak]

...and maybe also playing Crysis 2.
With all settings put to "low".
And with Aero disabled.

Re:And maybe....

[ikkonoishi]

No Crysis 2 requires 2.5 gigs. If you have less than that you can only run at 400 x 300, and replace all the textures with greyscale. The enemies still don't know how to climb stairs properly though.

Re:And maybe....

[Mr. Vage]

And with Aero disabled.

Actually disabling Aero manually will not result in a performance increase. When an application enters full-screen mode, DWM essentially shuts down since there are no windows to manage.

But of course this will get modded down because people here don't want to believe that Vista doesn't suck as much as they think it does.

Re:And maybe....

[Slime-dogg]

What happens when you're using dual monitors?

Re:And maybe....

[abstract daddy]

But of course this will get modded down because people here don't want to believe that Vista doesn't suck as much as they think it does.

It does suck, that's why people don't like it. If it didn't suck then I wouldn't have wasted my time installing XP on a laptop that doesn't properly support it.

Re:Wow..

[v1k]

>By all means whale on MS, but at least do it for the right reasons.

Hehe you said whale. Because Vista is a whale. I get it.

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

By all means whale on MS, but at least do it for the right reasons.

Or, if a whale is too heavy, just slap MS around a bit with a large trout.

But...

[Temtongkek]

Does it run Linux?

Re:But...

[joeman3429]

yeah, you just have to figure out how to plug your keyboard into the GPU O.o

Nvidia Tesla has 4 GB

[RecessionCone]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_c1060.html How about a little research before posting these stories???

Re:Nvidia Tesla has 4 GB

[l0cust]

FTL:
Available in Fall 2008 as integrated workstation product

Useless.

[JohnnyBigodes]

Useless.

As the Tech Report benchmarked some time ago, more than 512MB on any non-workstation graphics card at this point in time (and probably for some time too) is nothing more than useless.

This is just made to hunt those that don't know any better... "OMG 2GB RAM TEH IS FASTUR!!!!"

Re:Useless.

[Shados]

In some games if you have a 1680x1050 monitor (fairly standard for 20-22 inch 16:9 LCDs), and you crank up texture quality and antialiasing up the wazoo, your card's memory will be the bottleneck. It isn't -too- common, but i've been bit a few times. 1 gig and up is overkill unless you have one heck of a monitor setup, however (for now).

Re:Wow..

[dave420]

Can we ditch this Aero meme now? It's not accurate, it was never accurate, and it makes everyone involved (including me by association) look like a complete retard. Aero works perfectly well on many low-end video cards produced in the last 4 or 5 years.

Re:what a load of drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

CounterStrike didn't have a physics engine. CounterStrike didn't have a graphics engine. It piggybacked off Half-Life, made by Valve, using heavily tweaked Quake2 engines from id.

So...if you want to exclude the foundation of what makes the game work, sure, CS was a small team project

Why do you do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this posted elsewhere and took the time to read through it. I think the evidence presented there is very much incontrovertible.

Honest question, why do you do all that? Don't you have better uses for your time? A family? Hobbies?

Re:Why do you do this?

[Ticklemonster]

I agree.

BAD IDEA for WinXP, Win2K - takes half your mem

[ClioCJS]

This will suck up 2 gigs of addressable memory space out of your 4 gig total. So even if you have a bazillion gigs of ram, your OS will only see 2G.

Is it really worth slowing down ALL your performance just to have your games run a little faster? Better hope those games don't require much memory, or that you are running a 64-bit OS!

Re:BAD IDEA for WinXP, Win2K - takes half your mem

[yukk]

Well, maybe they need to bump this thing up to 4GB and create a "reverse-shared-memory-mode" graphics option because the RAM on this card is a heck of a lot faster than the RAM my CPU has access to. Hey, I could still leave 512MB for graphics.

Re:BAD IDEA for WinXP, Win2K - takes half your mem

[ClioCJS]

that would be fuckin' sweet!

Re:BAD IDEA for WinXP, Win2K - takes half your mem

[mr_mischief]

The 64-bit OS part is easy these days. It's better to hope that your hardware all has drivers for the 64-bit OS and that the games your running don't flail and crash on 64-bit OSes.

Pure Marketing

[inotocracy]

Whats the point of a 2GB 4850? 4870X2 sure, but a single 4850? Marketing at its best.

Re:Wow..

[Klaus_1250]

Some of us actually miss Clippy.

To add to your list: Internet Explorer (for lack of security and disregard for following standards), OOXML (design, corruption of standarisation process, non-implementation), abuse of office furniture (notably chairs), abuse of monopoly (at least according to the EU), overpricing (settled for a billion dollar), ... Pretty sure this list of right reasons can go on for a while.

Address space problems with 2GB card??

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember hearing that this is a problem for PCI / PCI devices, anyone comment?

hahahahahhaa

[unity100]

oh pal, im one of the grumpiest 33 year old gamers you can find on the planet. ive been playing games since 1982, zx spectrum, and played it all, had it all, bored from them all. including all prominen rtses, turn based strategies, rpgs, and all prominent mmogs.

now i only play occasionally to have a change. and to be honest, that eye candy helps great deal with changing the mood into the game atmosphere.

In 10 years

[just_forget_it]

This will be a minimum requirement to run Microsoft Word.

Re:In 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

we'll all be speaking chinese

Re:In 10 years

[joeman3429]

Gorammit!

Re:In 10 years

[getek2006]

10.... I'd bet something more like 5. And Windows 8 will need a quad core 5GHz processor, and the whole PC will be connected to your home duct work to replace the heat pump. But the secretary will still have to add a space heater to her cube because it is too cold in the office. While the rest of us die from heat exhaustion. While at the same time someone posts to slashdot from an 8bit uProc with 32K of ram, on which he just installed linux.

mandatory joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this could probably maybe run Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:mandatory joke

[digitrev]

That's obligatory joke, you insensitive clod!

Re:what a load of drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

Counterstrike was not a game built from the ground up--most of the "heavy lifting" had already been done.

Moreover, Counterstrike itself is old, so your witty riposte does not apply.

Also, Counterstrike blows. But that's a assert() for another day.

Obligatory:

[lordofwhee]

But can it run Linux?

Mod parent +1, Insightful

[Firehed]

And when you've done that, feel free to mod me up too :)

Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Moraelin]

While _some_ people do buy based on screenshots, the blanket generalization is little more than wishful thinking on the part of the publisher. You know, right next to, "people don't mind it if it's released buggy and patched later" and "people don't talk to each other, they only take their information from our marketing department."

The most visible fly in the ointment is WoW. It has the least detailed graphics of any MMO since, I dunno, 2003 or so. Yes, it actually has less polygons and lower detail textures than some games _older_ than it. Shader effects, bump-mapping, and any kind of shiny stuff are almost non-existent. (Ok, ok, they added weather later.) It also sold like hot cakes.

EQ2 was launched roughly at the same time as WoW, and tried to have _much_ higher resolution graphics and a metric buttload of shader effects. You can't even have a freaking armour modelled as just a texture, it just has to have a shader that makes it look 3D. It required a 512 MB card just to play with all those details... at a time where such a card didn't even exist. I think it never managed to get more than 1/50 the number of players WoW had, and it went slowly downhill from there.

Interestingly enough, more people complained about EQ2's "sterile graphics" than about WoW's cartoonish ones. (See what Penny Arcade had to say about EQ2's graphics back then, for example.) Turns out that just using insane texture resolutions and polygon counts isn't a substitute for talent, you know?

City Of Heroes had a _major_ graphics upgrade in Issue 6 (which coincides with launching the City Of Villains standalone expansion-pack), and the new Villain zones _quadruple_ even that number of polygons on screen. But let's concentrate on the COH side alone, because that was almost the same old game as before, only with a ton of graphical upgrades. Funnily, it didn't produce much of a jump in the number of players, and certainly no lasting effect. Anyway, the game peaked at 175,000 players in the USA alone soon after launch, and went gradually downhill from there. Last I heard a number it was last year at 145,000 in all territories combined and including both COV and COH players.

Basically high-res, shiny graphics don't seem to do all that much. Sure, it helps if you're not butt ugly. But if you look at the number of subscribers, the effect of insane graphics just isn't there. EQ2 vs WoW, the better game won, not the one requiring a new graphics card. Or COH pre-I6 and post-I6, just doesn't show the players rushing in because of the graphics.

Or in the offline game arena, The Sims was launched as a mostly 2D game with 2D sprites (ok, it used primitive low-polycount 3D graphics for the characters), in an age of shiny 3D games. It outsold not only any of those shiny 3D FPS games from the same year, it outsold them all combined.

And I'll further guess that Crysis and all those other games presented as "proof" that graphics sell... they probably had some other merits too. A lot fewer people would have bough them, if their _only_ merit were the graphics. Games with good, shiny graphics have flopped before.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[morcego]

There is one of the things that most impressed me about WoW.

I'm an old time NWN fan and player. Played it for 4 or 5 years (don't recall). When NWN2 came out, I was surprised by the hardware requirements (much, MUCH higher than nwn1).

When I decided to try WoW, the first thing I did was check for requirements (which are not easy to find). Later I found I would be able to run it even on my 855GM if I cared to (I have something better than that).

I'm willing to bet a lot of WoW players only have on-board graphic cards. There is a big market segment that ALL other mmorpgs were overlooking. And Blizzard hit the jackpot there.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Molochi]

This is in support of your argument. Every quarter or so I do the Valve hardware survey that logs our gaming systems' specs so that they can get a handle on what paying customers are using. The top 15 right now are...

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 166,588 9.37 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 101,218 5.70 %
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 95,619 5.38 %
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 79,478 4.47 %
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 64,704 3.64 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 59,544 3.35 %
ATI Radeon 9600 54,727 3.08 %
ATI Radeon 9200 45,585 2.57 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 44,134 2.48 %
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 42,834 2.41 %
ATI Radeon X1950 41,533 2.34 %
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 40,839 2.30 %
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 38,990 2.19 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 36,192 2.04 %
ATI Radeon X800 35,449 1.99 %

About 1/3 of the top 15 cards are what the "Oooo Shiny Crysis Crowd" would call obsolete, and frankly the presence of a DX7 card even raises my eyebrow. This is the target audience for a powerful graphics card, but if Valve wants to sell to their customer base they can look at this and think, "Gee, maybe we should make a game that doesn't require a fuckton of curiously high bandwidth LMNOPRAM.and maybe make a fun game that at least scales down well.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech sells

See any Id game

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Anonymous Coward]

EQ2 ran just spiffy for me on a 128MB video card that was already out of date at the time.

You can say what you please about graphics and Penny Arcade, but EQ2 failed because of gameplay (or lack thereof), not because of graphics.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[pjt33]

There is a big market segment that ALL other mmorpgs were overlooking.

RuneScape?

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[morcego]

Thank you for proving my point.

Never heard about RuneScape before.

I'm pretty sure there are several mmorpgs out there that few people (relatively speaking) know about that can run even on VGA cards. My point being: mainstream mmorpgs. Sorry about not making it clear.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[pjt33]

It's currently at #2 for active subscriptions according to mmogchart.com. Unless you define "mainstream mmorpgs" to mean "WoW" I think it qualifies.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[morcego]

I define it from a media/marketing point of view.

But if you are right, and the top 2 mmorpgs are the "only ones" that support low end video card, that is an even more important information.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? Only one of the cards in the top 15 you posted even knows Crysis exists! If you think the 8600 is "ooh shiny Crysis" material, you are SORELY mistaken. That's 14/15...

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an ATI Radeon 9500 ASC. It lets me get 1000 fps in Nethack.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[LionMage]

He never said that. He said about 1/3 of the top 15 cards are what the "Crysis Crowd" would call obsolete -- in other words, not "shiny Crysis material." He never said any of the cards in that list were "Crysis material."

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[petermgreen]

What I find interesting is that the list seems to be dominated by nvidia (although given that the list only accounts for about half the users the impression it gives may be very skewed).

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[ejecta]

Don't laugh but I use an ATI Rage 128 33MB SDRAM card for our families gaming needs.

Which are;
- Total Annihilation
- Warcraft 3
- Sim City 3000
- Monopoly 3D
- Grand Theft Auto 3

I feel no need for shiny new things, I've a playstation 2 aswell with GT3/4, GTA:VC/SA, Red Faction I/II, Half Life 1 but mostly our family plays the PC and other small kids games on the PC. I'd like to come across a game with the replayability and options/depth of Total Annihilation but nothing these days has really caught my eye and been something I've "had to have".

Maybe I'm just too old for these new fangled games!

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[slimjim8094]

you hit on it with your last thing.

Valve knows how to make really good looking games. See portal or TF2, or even better EP2.

However, those games will still run fine on a DX8 card if you turn down the settings. And the other Source games (not the source 07 games) will run on dx7 just fine.

It's something I've never figured out. Hell, even Halo 1 (PC) degraded nicely. Give gamers something they can play, and let it grow with their hardware.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[westlake]

Every quarter or so I do the Valve hardware survey
.

It's easy to imagine the geek choking on the thought that 15% of your users are running Vista. Which tracks closely with the webstats from Net Applications.

I am curious how this plays out long-term:

Do your customers stick with their original OEM cards or on-board video until they replace or upgrade their systems as a whole? How often do they upgrade?
Do they - as households - keep an oddball mix of older and newer hardware online?

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Anonymous Coward]

The most visible fly in the ointment is WoW. It has the least detailed graphics of any MMO since, I dunno, 2003 or so. Yes, it actually has less polygons and lower detail textures than some games _older_ than it. Shader effects, bump-mapping, and any kind of shiny stuff are almost non-existent.

Quotes like this should justify a (-1, Wrong) moderation option. WoW had high detailed textures, but relatively low polygon counts for the models. It also had a lot of shiny features, such as the full screen glow effect gave made some of the initial screenshots more "oh!" when the game first launched. I'll grant you that WoW did more with less, but let's not pretend it did something amazing like use 1990's era art assets to create the game.

BTW, WoW was launched in 2004, so competing with games made in 2003 isn't a stretch.

EQ2 was launched roughly at the same time as WoW, and tried to have _much_ higher resolution graphics and a metric buttload of shader effects. You can't even have a freaking armour modelled as just a texture, it just has to have a shader that makes it look 3D. It required a 512 MB card just to play with all those details... at a time where such a card didn't even exist. I think it never managed to get more than 1/50 the number of players WoW had, and it went slowly downhill from there.

Except for the fact that this is what EQ1 did. Back when EQ1 launched, they *required* a 3D card. That was pure INSANITY according to the conventional wisdom at the time, because few single-player games required you to have a 3D card; most games had a software renderer, too, that looked like crap. This was back when 3Dfx was the top dog and you had to install Glide because DirectX wasn't quite up to snuff.

For those of you that don't know your MMO history, EQ1 blew away everyone playing MMOs. It surpassed the old games like Ultima Online and Meridian 59 despite having gameplay that now bores people to tears. And, the graphics didn't age gracefully even a short while after launch. I still remember the ogre women who had breasts so angular you could cut stone with them.

So, really, EQ2 was doing what most people consider the success behind EQ1. They made a graphically superior game and were hoping that people would flock to it. It had worked before, even with a strong game brand like Ultima competing.

It just turns out that Warcraft was a stronger brand and ate Sony's lunch. Oops.

As for your CoH example, most major online games get one chance to attract users: at launch. Upgrades to the graphics pretty much only appeal to the existing fanbase; an upgrade is used to retain existing customers, not attract new ones. People get cranky of a game isn't updated on a regular basis. Sadly, this "first impressions only" issue is the same reason people won't try EQ2 even though they now have graphic cards quite capable of handling the game. It's actually improved considerably since launch. The graphics aren't pretty, though.

But, sadly, many people do buy games based on screenshots or a license. Take Enter the Matrix for example. Universally considered a terrible game, but it was a top selling game primarly because of the Matrix name. Most people regretted it soon after because of the crashes and bugs that plagued the game.

Some insight from a game developer who, unfortuantely, already moderated some posts on this thread. And, no, I didn't work on WoW or EQ2.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Albert Sandberg]

but if you check the age of these cards, when they were cutting edge, you might look back 3 years, right?

and 3 years is prob. what it takes to develop a AAA title, so you should prob. get the fattest card out there today and develop for it, because when your game hits the market, that's the card people will have.

nothing wrong with having a cut down version of the options in the game to allow older cards, but if I were to code a game, I'd do it with ps3 shaders and tons of ram.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Nicolay77]

Nevermind that's easier to get people for a Counterstrike match than for Team Fortress 2.

Not that TF2 is bad in any way, but as it requires a bigger machine, the number of players gets smaller.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[floodo1]

I wouldn't call this representative of the market as a whole. Valve sells ZERO graphics intensive games. Thus one could conclude that their survey is likely skewed away from high-end cards. One could imagine that if Crytek did the same survey it would be supremely skewed in the other direction, towards high end cards. Your point is still valid, in that most people DONT buy high end cards and stay in the sub $200 market (at best), or just stick with what their computer came with.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[douji]

What about Supreme Commander? Sins of a Solar Empire? Dawn of War?

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[ejecta]

SupCom has me tempted to upgrade the entire pc (although it may run on this not sure) but at the end of the day I'm happy with the Total Annihilation mods available especially the Works Project and apparently there is also a SupCom conversion although I haven't revisited its progress in 10 months or so.

If a game ever game out with all the fun of Street Rod 2 developed the engine & body modifications of Street Rod 2 further and had a sandbox world like GTA I'd be all over it like a fat kid on a cup cake though!

I still remember when I first got SR2 on my 8086 with awesome blue/white CGA graphics - I sat up all night until the wee hours of the morning playing over and over to get the dodgy shelby with dual tunnel rams!

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[douji]

I never actually got into TA, but I've been a long time Starcraft player. It was quite a shock when my friend introduced me to SupCom. The problem with SupCom is: with so many units, it seems to be very hard to balance properly, leading to some, imo, unfair strategies. It makes me amazed at how well blizzard was able to balance SC with the vastly different races and abilities. I started gaming pretty late though.. Doom2 -> Duke 3d -> Quake -> Starcraft, time period

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[ejecta]

When it first came out I thought it sounded like a dumb game and looked a bit dumb preferring instead to continue playing C&C/Warcraft - it wasn't until probably circa 2004/5 that I stumbled upon a second hand copy for $2 and a thift store that I picked it up and had a go and, well, my kids didn't seem much of me that weekend - I was a bad parent for a weekend and played all night friday, all day saturday, all night saturday and sunday morning before spending the rest of sunday with the kids, heh heh.

Whilst it seems like there's a bazillion units in TA and as if there'd be a steep learning curve it actually comes pretty naturally once you fiddle & play. the Total Annihilation Works Project also adds more units to the original game and removes others giving it more balance than the original developers ever gave it.

In a way I really want to get & play SupCom but on the other hand I'm happy with TA. But then I also don't think my little VIA C7 1.5Ghz could handle it.

Think about graphics programming

[IYagami]

Think about nVidia CUDA or OpenCL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL)
Or about physics in your graphics card

4GB of Memory on the Tesla C1060

[Anonymous Coward]

The Tesla C1060 has 4GB of Memory. It is still a graphics card.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_c1060.html

Re:FRIST P0ZT - EP1C F@1L!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow more than 10 minutes late. You fail it.

Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

640GB should be enough for everyone.

Re:Oblig

[Dan667]

dang, you so stole my line.

O come on guys

[hubdawg]

the card is not the first, unless you use the spin doctor way they present it on their website. Us /.ters really are more intelligent than the average consumer. We can immediately tell when some monster corporation is trying to spin us. yeah maybe one component or process they employ is the first time it has been done. But usually the first time around it is not always a good thing. Keep trying megalarge corporation spinsters.

Re:what a load of drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly in the Valve office, actually, considering they did the lion's share of the codebase that makes up Counterstrike. The possibilities for innovation when small-time developers are limited to only making MODS for popular commercial games are pretty low, so I'm afraid you haven't refuted anyone's point. You did kind of succeed at being a turd, though, so congratulations on one of two goals accomplished?

Re:what a load of drivel

[damn_registrars]

Where was counterstrike developed? Thanks for playing but you failed at scaremongering.

That comparison would be better if counterstrike involved a large amount of original code. It may have had some interesting abilities that weren't already present in half-life, but you can't say that the counterstrike team developed it from anything resembling scratch.

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

Whales on Microsoft?

Nethack will rock rendered by this

[Trikenstein]

And blazing fps!

Finaly

[Anonymous Coward]

Finlay something that can play crysis.

3D professional

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the first... The first is the Firegl V8650 which debuted last Fall. However this is the first consumer-level Gaming video card.

Only makes sense with 64bit OS

[zav42]

In my experience games mirror all assets which are located on the graphic card also in system memory. Unfortunately a 32bit Windows EXE can only address 2GB of virtual memory no matter how much physical memory you have. Managing even 1GB of graphic assets in only 2GB of address room is pretty pointless. So the requirements for such cards should state that they require a 64bit OS to make any sense. -Bernd

Re:MOD DOWN redundant troll.

[Macthorpe]

OH NO, I'M ATTACKING MYSELF!

Everybody flee - if the anti-me touches the real me there will be a terrible, reality-ending explosion.

Re:MOD DOWN redundant troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

what the fuck?

Debate, what debate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we were having a discussion. Oh, I see, everything is like combat to you.

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think you may have responded to the wrong thread. His name is Higaran, not Jesus.

Screw Gaming...

[Penguinisto]

...at least in this context. Now OTOH, 3D/CG render engines that have OpenGL-rendering can do a whole hell of a lot with a beefy GPU and 2GB of RAM.

Normally, compared to software (CPU) raytracing, OGL rendering is pretty crappy on vidcards with low resources (shadows are jaggy, etc)... but with enough RAM and a high-end GPU, quality and speed could approach (if not surpass) the old-school "click 'render' then go have lunch" routine that most CG artists deal with nowadays.

/P

2GiB on this card is just a marketing gimmick

[Sir_Sri]

the 4870 with 512 MiB of DDR5 ram is probably still better.

So long as the scene fits in ram, extra ram is a marketting gimmick and nothing more, and at the moment AMD seems to have found 512 is sufficient for the high end. After than what matters is data throughput from RAM to the gpu itself. nVIDIA went with a wide memory bus and slower ram, AMD in the 4870 went with a narrow bus, fast ram, and in the 4850, of which this card is a variant is the same size bus as the 4870 but with the same old DDR3 ram. Given the choice, buy a 4870 with 512 DDR5 and not a 4850 with 2GiB DDR3.

N.B. the 4850 and 4870 are similar but the 4870 is clocked faster and has faster ram. The 4850 is bandwidth limited at high resolutions, not memory limited.

Reaganomics in gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of reliance on jet-powered hardware kind of insures that the game is going to be all megacorporations working from market research.

Mostly yes, but there is a trickle-down effect of licensed engines and other technology.

id for instance, releasing their older games as open source. Or the development of DirectX and OpenGL, neither would have progressed very far w/o big time support.
Before only highly experienced/motivated programmers could make heads or tales of 3D programming.
Now the barrier to entry is actually much lower.

It's a different market than movies/music where the little guys get no benefit from the existence of the conglomerates.

one example is incorrect

[unity100]

Or in the offline game arena, The Sims was launched as a mostly 2D game with 2D sprites (ok, it used primitive low-polycount 3D graphics for the characters), in an age of shiny 3D games. It outsold not only any of those shiny 3D FPS games from the same year, it outsold them all combined

sims's appeal is different. housewives, grandmas even play sims. same people dont play fpses.

Re:what a load of drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

Goldsrc (the engine used by Half Life, Counter Strike, 007 Nightfire) was based on the Quake 1 engine, not Quake 2.

mod parent funny

[unity100]

mod them right when you spot one.

Re:Wow..

[petermgreen]

I actually quite liked the office assistant (and miss it in newer releases of office), quick access to help and something to amuse yourself with when the writing was getting too tedious.

Though I did preffer links or rocky to clippy.

um....

[quest(answer)ion]

is anyone else bothered by the fact that this "ZOMG RAM" video card uses the 4850 processor? so...second string processor, huge amounts of RAM...it's like they're *begging* to have the GPU be the bottleneck. this much memory would definitely be better used on a faster card.

don't get me wrong, the 4850 is a nice chip, but it seems a bit like hanging a diamond necklace on a small dog. nifty, if you're into that sort of thing, but ultimately just decorative.

VERY quiet

[unity100]

i have a 3870 that has a similar fan. these fans are very silent even running at 50% speed. its around 40 degrees celsius with 99% humidity where i live, and this fan can keep my 3870 around 50 degrees no load, 56-60 with load, using only 50% fan.

Re:what a load of drivel

[hr.wien]

I can mention lots, but they don't have extremely awesome HDR graphics and player counts in the millions.

Their developers still can make a comfortable living though, and that's really the point. When you're a small team you don't need EA-scale success to make a profit.

mod parent insightful

[unity100]

ffs. im posting in this thread, cant use points.

Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

What? High end graphics card don't mean that small games won't run on it.

What you're saying is that people shouldn't get the awesome games they want because a few mom and pop businesses need to thrive? Seriously?

If somebody makes a good small game, it can still spread around and get popular enough (minimally on its own scale) if people like it. Nothing is blocking that. The internet still has forums, and IM etc. word of mouth can spread far better than in the BBS days 15-25 years ago. How did youtube get popular .. and it was started by a few guys. If a game is made by a few folks, it can still get super popular if it's really good. You don't need a massive marketing budget.

But most people want high end graphics games, if not why are they are choosing it?

Furthermore, with toolkits and development IDE's etc. and re-use, mom & pop folks can still make decent games with good graphics. It's totally a win-win situation. More jobs for game programmers, game artists, IDE developers, etc. and even mom & pops with big ideas. Better and more variety of games for everyone in the end.

Procedural Content

[Kaeles]

That is, until someone figures out how to easily use the pc to generate the content itself (meaning textures/3d models, not the game content), removing the need for 3d artists, and pushing the indie game realm back into the limelight, due to the fact that you could create all the crap you need that way, and only need to program again.

Re:Wow..

[BrentH]

needs to die

Now now, that's not how you end your letter to Jesus...

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Jesus, my ex's laptop..."

Holy kikes Batman! You're right!

iD

[Hythlodaeus]

iD's next engine is going to use landscapes with no repeated/tiled textures. Textures involved will be up to 128000 pixels square for a minimum of 2.93 GB uncompressed for the largest textures. Potentially more if light-mapping, HDR, or alpha channels are used.

Re:iD

[oljanx]

My house is brown. The south facing side of my house has weathered differently than the north facing side, which has affected not only the color of the paint, but the look of the grain in the siding. Subtle differences like this would add a whole new degree of reality to games. The more memory available for textures the better.

Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it be enough to run Vista?

and the winners are...

[westlake]

How about games with good gameplay and bad graphics? Those exist too
.

Examples?

Post-1998, if you please.

Re:and the winners are...

[cliffski]

wii fit and wii sports. Lux, Dwarf Fortress. Pretty much all casual games. Peggle.
My games!

Re:and the winners are...

[Torvaun]

The Pokemon games are 2d sprites, and they're huge. Tribes 2. Diablo 2. The Baldur's Gate games for the PC, though I might be a little early with those. N.

Re:and the winners are...

[westlake]

The Baldur's Gate games for the PC, though I might be a little early with those.
.

I'll admit to a liking for the isometric 2D RPG. Your characters are easy to manipulate. The environments have a spaciousness - if that is the right word - and detail that would take a lot of horsepower to render in 3D. But I wouldn't call the graphics and animation in these classic games primitive or simplistic.

Re:and the winners are...

[somersault]

primitive or simplistic are not the same as 'bad'.. I love the graphics on old 2D point and click adventure games :)

Re:Wow..

[limaxray]

Yeah, Aero will run on any graphics card that handles even the most basic hardware acceleration. The thing is, it does suck up resources and frankly isn't all that great. Now back in the day when my laptop ran Vista, turning on Aero to its maximum settings meant Windows took nearly a GB of memory to sit idle. That to me is not acceptable.

Now if you don't understand why people bash on Aero, I suggest you take a look at Compiz. Not only does it do MUCH more than Aero, it uses far fewer resources. Running Ubuntu on that same laptop with Compiz cranked all the way up, I use a whooping 350 MB of memory. Granted, some of that comparison has to do with the differences in the two OSs, but I assure you Aero is relatively a resource hog.

More Textures!

[oljanx]

It would certainly allow for more texture variety in games. Grey walls and brown paths repeated across a map get really boring, even in modern games.

Re:Wow..

[spazdor]

abuse of monopoly (at least according to the End Users)

fixed.

Re:Wow..

[flyspagmon]

Yeah I am sick of these crappy MS knocking memes, that just get repeated and repeated. Anyway 640 Meg should be enough for anyone to run Aero..

More memory ?

[Der PC]

> That's more memory than I've had in any computer prior to this year

Huh... that's less memory than I have in any of my computers, save the vintage stock - and my XPC.

Server: 4GB
Laptop: 4GB
Workstation: 14GB

Guess your milage actually does vary :P

Re:More memory ?

[pandrijeczko]

I think you're somewhat dangerously confusing us with people who give a shit...

Actually, apologies. There is one guy who gives a shit, here's his IP address:

127.0.0.1

Maybe now I can play...

[DigitalEntropy]

...Daikatana.

Good for MMOs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also useful if you need to run 10 EVE-Online clients.

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, my ex's laptop runs Vista with Aero effects turned up to maximum with no problems and a crappy NVidia mobile GPU. This stupid "Aero eats your resources" meme needs to die.

I believe the parent's name is Higaran, not Jesus.

Re:you have no idea (MOD parent up)

[DeadDecoy]

Every now and then I visit gametrailers to check out the new games and those that aren't hyper-realistic (even those that don't try to be) are modded the fuck down with a list of comments saying how crappy the graphics are. I find this a little annoying, particularly with games that aren't trying to be realistic because they are attempting a more artistic flare. Consider WoW (I don't play), most people now think the graphics are crap, but they fail to notice that the low resolution graphics makes the game run smoother and they actually have a certain artistic style to them. I think we've gotten to the state where there are just waaay too many people are trying to be elitist by acting jaded over reasonably good graphics. As a consequence they fail to acknowledge the other features that make a game good: novelty, innovative gameplay, detailed stories, etc. and what we're left with is a bunch of fps clones :P.

Re:Wow..

[daybot]

Aero works perfectly well on many low-end video cards produced in the last 4 or 5 years.

It also works very poorly on many perfectly respectable video cards produced in the last 4 or 5 years. It ran terribly on our recent $360 to $600 Quadro cards. We've now upgraded to XP :)

Re:Wow..

[Lost Engineer]

Free memory is wasted memory. Just because Vista was reported as using 1GB doesn't mean it was actively accessing that RAM, so as to create a problem.

Geeks in space!

[Zaffle]

My God, I remember (I honestly do!) the Geeks In Space episode where Taco is discussion the new 256MB video card. The discussion went something like this:
"What would you do with 256MB of video ram!"
"Store your porn in it"
*laughs*
"That'd make playing Doom fun... Hey Thats a *nice* wall"

64bpp and more

[achurch]

make it triple buffering with 64 bpp (for what, exactly, I don't know. But it's a worst case scenario), and you're still only at 90 megs.

64bpp probably isn't too common, but how about 128bpp: 32-bit float channels for ARGB. Sure, you won't need all those bits for display, but they come in handy if you want to apply effects to the graphic data. (Whether framebuffer manipulation is a performance win compared to pixel shaders for any given operation is a separate question, and admittedly one I haven't investigated.)

Re:MOD DOWN redundant troll.

[willyhill]

twitter, I thought dedazo is me? Or is that the other way around as you've claimed in the past?

And why are you blabbering about "M$FT accounts" with your sockpuppets?

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody"

I'm still not convinced

[Moraelin]

Except for the fact that this is what EQ1 did. Back when EQ1 launched, they *required* a 3D card. That was pure INSANITY according to the conventional wisdom at the time, because few single-player games required you to have a 3D card; most games had a software renderer, too, that looked like crap. This was back when 3Dfx was the top dog and you had to install Glide because DirectX wasn't quite up to snuff.

EQ1 was also the far better game at the time. Simply because the competition was even worse.

Since you mention UO, it was still a fucked-up, unbalanced, small, simplistic, gank-fest. The dynamic duo of self-centered narcisists, Lord British and his trusty sidekick Raph Koster (who'd later do the same with SWG) were still telling players what they should like, instead of even trying to notice what players actually want. Untested patches were issued that broke more than they fixed, and some had to be rolled back because they were a catastrophe. The fact that Lord British diverted the bug-fixing budget of UO to make Ultima 9, also didn't help.

And that's the short version. One could fill a tome with what was wrong with UO, and what got worse. It was only after EQ and AC ate their lunch big time, that Origin even started considering fixing their game.

If we're talking about looks and angular breasts, a lot of us actually thought that the 2D graphics of UO actually looked _better_ than the hideous 3D mess of EQ or AC. But UO just didn't give us what we wanted. So EQ won.

Don't mistake players for the circle-jerk clique of online reviewers. Reviewers seem to get outright orgasms over "OMG, it's shiny" or, back then, "OMG it's 3D". The average player cared a lot more about gameplay. EQ may bore you to tears by nowadays standards, but back then it was the best by a wide margin. Or rather: the competition was even worse. If you will, EQ2 won by being the one-eyed in the land of the blind.

And it seems to me like EQ2 is the result of just that kind of mistake. Sony got caught in the same mistaken belief that the servile "OMG, it's shiny" gang of reviewers actually represent the average gamer. And produced a game whose only merit was "OMG, it's shiny." And lost.

It just turns out that Warcraft was a stronger brand and ate Sony's lunch. Oops.

Brand only gets you so far. Star Wars was a bigger brand name than EQ and Warcraft _combined_, and it still got to be merely a niche game. The Sims had sold more copies than all Warcraft games _and_ Everquest _combined_, and it outright flopped. Etc.

Basically a crap game with a good franchise, still flops.

And if we're talking about EQ vs Warcraft, actually I remember it the other way around. Sony was _the_ big name in MMOs and everyone expected EQ2 to be teh uber-game that sweeps everyone off their feet. Blizzard was just another unproven "me too." People wanted a Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 from them, not a MMO. The reaction to Blizzard's announcement that they're making a MMO was _disappointment_, not "yay, I'm preordering it because it's Warcraft." The average Warcraft player was a RTS player, and was just about as looking forward to an MMO as to root canal.

So, no, Sony was the bigger name there, and it lost anyway.

WoW had high detailed textures, but relatively low polygon counts for the models.

High detailed is relative. By comparison to EQ2, which is what I was trying to do, WoW is a lot lower res. Or at least EQ2 needed 512 MB for max details, WoW ran decently on an 128 MB card. If that's not due to textures, well, I'm curious what it was.

Poor man`s choice

[jmakov]

When did /. become duke nukem/photoshop forum? No mention of [folding@home stats] http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats or [gpu cluster projects] http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Projects/GPUcluster/projects.html. Now even students can buy this cheap hardware and play and develop AI, numerical codes and do some hardcore research. And no, it has nothing to do with DukeNukem.

In a world.......

[HouseArrest420]

In a world where most people are still utilizing 32 bit OS's this card will only be a waste of money. Think about it. You have the 2 gig of ram plus 2 gig of phsyical memory....there is your 4 gig max before you even turn on your machine. People with only 2 gig of physical ram in thier machine are always crying they don't have enough memory....yet they're going to run to the store and pay how much?!? in order to ensure that if they put more than 2 gig into thier 32 bit system its competeley useless?? I personally have a 64 bit system, so this card in my system wouldn't hurt, but there are going to be TONS of people that get fucked by this 'advanced' technology....especially considering the fact that an application that would even make a dent in that 2 gigs of memory is far from being marketed and shipped out for home use. For real, the only people that I can personally see getting anything out of this are people in the 3d field. Even if this thing isn't optimized for better performance, 2 gig will STILL help them work thru a complex scene with millions of polygons. Excluding professionals, who would need 2gigs of memory on thier video card with the apps/games that are out right now....or the ones lined up for the nest 2-3 years?

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, and you can help. Just start modding all linux posts down and all microsoft posts up. /sarcasm

Get used to it man, Vista is just the reincarnation of 98ME. -1 Troll me please.

I can see it now

[patio11]

47,300 weapons
2,100,000 possible denizens from Hell to fight you
136,000 rooms rendered in glorious 3D

And every single monster still pops up right behind you after you move through the door.

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

no, aero actually melts your video card. I just submitted my 3rd support request to nvidia for this problem. They have yet to reply.

Re:MOD DOWN redundant troll.

[trimmer]

Multiple personality syndrome at its best. Oh yeah, you're the good guy who collects your other sockpuppets' trollings. Nice.