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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.
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?
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.
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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.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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?
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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 read the internet for the articles.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
:P
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.
You can't handle the tin!
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
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.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
"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.
Chris Knight is my hero.