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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.
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.
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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