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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 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.
Full Tilt
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...
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.
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. :)
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).
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What happens when you're using dual monitors?
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.