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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.
Workstation cards have been multi-gigabyte for ages! the ATI FireGL V8650 which was released a while ago is 2GB.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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.
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