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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?
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).
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.
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 ]
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.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
How about games with good gameplay and bad graphics? Those exist too, and they are better than games with good graphics and bad gameplay.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.