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.

Comments

2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great for the pointless eye-candy first-person shooters. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[jandrese]

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).

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[TheEmrys]

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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[the_humeister]

You could always use it as a ram drive!

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Firehed]

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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[mr_mischief]

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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[default luser]

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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Stepnsteph]

A number of you seem to be completely missing the point. Let me help you with that.

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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[xouumalperxe]

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. :)

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Hurricane78]

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).

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[CelticWhisper]

Heard of that. Personally I'm waiting for psychotropic filtering. That oughta be a lot of fun.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[petermgreen]

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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[RedShoeRider]

"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.

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[Godji]

when Will Wright teams up with John Carmack

Create your very own mindless zombie alien hovering ball of goo that shoots acid thing, and unleash it against the unsuspecting online community! Design your very own oversized ultra new tech nuclear powered futuristic double barreled organic biorocket launcher weapon and fight against hordes of the deadliest community-created horror creatures. Battle with your aim against others' wit in the first ever MMOFPS in history: S I M Q U A K E

Hm, I was joking but that sounds like something I would play! DAMN YOU Slashdot for giving this idea to a guy who is not the CEO of a game developer house!

Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh?

[default luser]

I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well.

That's exactly what I meant. You can attach all the memory you want to a video card, true, but there is a limit to how much you can conceivably use.

When you use more memory, you use more memory bandwidth; this is an undisputable fact. If you double the resolution of textures in a scene, the texture memory bandwidth you need to render that scene doubles. If you double your resolution, the amount of framebuffer writes doubles.

Since memory bandwidth is finite, you can only add so much before it becomes worthless. This is why the 2GB would be FAR MORE useful on a DDR5 card like the 4870, or else the GTX 280 with a 512-bit memory bus.

Don't get me wrong; the 4850 has just enough memory bandwidth to perform efficiently in it's current configuration, and I like it so much I bought one myself. But anything above 1GB on the 4850 will be wasted, because you cannot magically increase the bandwidth.

Heh, you don't have to tell me that we'll always need MORE MEMORY. My first 3D accelerator featured an amazing 4MB of memory! But along the same line as above, I wouldn't have put 16MB of ram on my first card, because it would have been worthless with the limited 64-bit bus.

Bottlenecks?

[Squapper]

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?

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Applekid]

But wouldn't squeezing 2 gigs of memory on a graphics card simply move the limiting bottlenecks elsewhere?

Well, sure. No matter how good your gaming rig is there's always going to be a bottleneck. And if it's an older game that runs 200 fps at full detail, then the bottleneck is the game itself capping maximum poly/texture counts (ie. the detail itself).

But the whole point of having and maintaining l33t gamer systems is to continually shift that bottleneck somewhere else which is also farther up the scale of performance so you keep getting a better gaming experience with each iteration.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[eebra82]

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.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[larry bagina]

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You beef up the weakest link. The chain still has a weakest link, but the overall strength is raised.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[El Gigante de Justic]

Yes, it could, unless you're running a 64-bit OS and processor. Most computers, which are 32-bit, have a total or 4 GB of addressable memory space, which includes video memory, sound card memory (if you actually still use one) and system RAM. Therefore, if you put in a 2GB video card, you can't make use more than 2 GB of system RAM.

The 4GB address limit is probably the best argument for why we should see more progression to 64 bit computing, but there isn't yet enough demand in the market to force the issue for at least a few more years.

Re:Bottlenecks?

[Geekner]

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.

Grammar Nazis, man your stations!

[Anonymous Coward]

> from the way-too-much-overkill dept.

AKA, the recursive tautology dept.

you have no idea

[unity100]

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.

Re:you have no idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:you have no idea

[Jasonjk74]

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.

Re:you have no idea

[Torvaun]

How about games with good gameplay and bad graphics? Those exist too, and they are better than games with good graphics and bad gameplay.

Re:you have no idea

[Jasonjk74]

How about games with good gameplay and bad graphics? Those exist too, and they are better than games with good graphics and bad gameplay.

Here's a novel concept: developers should strive for both graphics and content! That's just crazytalk...

Re:you have no idea

[Culture20]

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.

Re:you have no idea

[lgw]

WoW had fantastically good gameplay in areas that you overlook - it's very easy to learn if you've never played an MMO before, and it's very easy for a casual player to get addicted to (until the single-player content runs out).

This is wht WoW has 10 million subscribers: Blizzard took the same repetitive gameplay as every other MMO, and made it accessible to the casual gamer. The game much simpler in gameplay, and vastly better un usability, than its competitors.

Re:you have no idea

[cliffski]

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.

Re:you have no idea

[Oktober Sunset]

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.

Re:you have no idea

[WDot]

Why is it that whenever a shooter comes out with beautiful graphics, it's considered garbage, unimaginative, and "the reason PC gaming is dying?" People cry on message boards saying "Why release a game that requires a $2000 PC to play?" They say that their computer has a Geforce 3 still and if developers aren't going to cater to that, then fuck them.

Instead of imagining that PC gaming is in a sordid state, try this:
1. Go to some online electronics boutique and pay the $150 for a midrange video card that'll handle any modern game well. Make sure to check whether your motherboard has an AGP or PCI-Express slot, and buy accordingly.
2. Hang around some gaming websites like Destructoid and see what games interest other people. Find one that interests you. Buy it.
3. Install and play it. Discover that this isn't the 90's and that playing on "medium settings" doesn't mean everything looks like a muddy blob.
4. 2 years down the road, exercise self control and DON'T buy the latest video card. That's right. Just because a new generation of video cards comes out, doesn't mean you NEED to upgrade. You might be surprised to find out that new games will still run great on your old card!
5. Feel great knowing you're not just some whining tool who bashes a hobby that he doesn't know anything about.

P.S. Who the HELL do you talk to that bashes Half Life 2 because of the graphics? That game, like its ANCIENT predecessor, is still highly revered because of its storytelling techniques and finely tuned gameplay, not because of how many gigabytes of textures it had.

Re:you have no idea

[Draek]

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.

Re:you have no idea

[Draek]

I'd agree that games are supposed to look good but the problem is, how do you define "good graphics"? personally I define it as "it preserves a distinct artistic style throughout the entire presentation", but many people seem to define it as "how many polygons does it use for the main character".

For example, just to pick two old games, which one do you think has the best graphics, Castlevania 3 for the NES or Syphon Filter for the PSX? me, I'd take the former, since as much as I enjoyed the latter, it's graphics always gave me the feeling that they had been created by three different teams and then shoved together in the final product. Yet, the technology it uses is much superior to that of the NES, being 3D vs basic 2D.

So, it all depends on how you define it, and for those who define it the same way I do, criticizing developers for focusing solely on pushing more polygons instead of worrying about the gameplay is a perfectly valid complain, since for us all we're getting is higher system requirements, not better graphics, and certainly not better games.

Re:you have no idea

[somersault]

I don't think the poster was complaining about that exactly, it is a pretty natural progression. He was complaining about last gen always being lambasted so much, when in fact it's still passable.

I agree with him - I buy some of my movies as blu-ray and some as DVD, depending on whether they're just a drama, comedy, action movie, documentary, etc. Eventually I'll be buying everything in HD as the prices come down, but at the moment I consider DVD very adequate for most movies. Especially compared to the Standard Definition stuff that I get on my freeview box, it looks awful on a full HDTV.

Actually, in the past I've noticed that once a film gets started I don't even tend to notice the medium it's using anymore. For example I've re-watched some old Disney or Star Wars videotapes and eventually just got wrapped up in the story and hardly even noticed the crappy hissy sound quality (which I take much more umbrage at than low-res graphics).

Disney are still only getting around to releasing movies on DVD so that they can milk as much money as possible out of people buying all the different versions, it's pathetic. I was going to criticize the Star Wars movies of the same, but I've just noticed that it is due out 'soon', but it remains to be seen just how long that will actually take.

That's cool but...

[The Living Fractal]

The R700 has dual GPUs on a single board, competes very well with nVidia, and here's the really cool part: It has nearly TWO BILLION transistors.

Re:That's cool but...

[fr4nk]

Somehow I don't think that those two billion transistors will be cool.

Finally

[Rinisari]

I can finally do the Explode open/close window Compiz effect on my 10 MP display!

Huh

[colmore]

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.

Re:Huh

[erudified]

I tend to agree with the other poster who mentioned Counterstrike.

I'll take it a step further, though, and say this: I believe game development by mom & pop shops is about to enter a golden age.

High quality open source engines like Cube 2 (as well as many others) and a greater emphasis on procedural content generation (I give it a year or two before high quality open source libraries for this are available) will enable small developers to take advantage of these (somewhat insane!) hardware capabilities. You don't need ridiculous poly counts to have great gameplay, the Wii has proved that beyond any doubt. The open source world is very well equipped to provide small developers with huge sets of textures and models under licenses (e.g., creative commons) that will enable awesome things that we can't even imagine yet. I believe we will end up with more open gaming platforms as a result of these developments.

In short, no offense, and maybe I'm just an optimist, but I think you're 100% wrong ;)

Impressive!

[cashman73]

With graphics cards like this, Duke Nukem Forever will be damn good when/if it comes out! :-)

"FIRST" 2GB card? Err...

[TK2K]

Workstation cards have been multi-gigabyte for ages! the ATI FireGL V8650 which was released a while ago is 2GB.

UNIX did it a decade ago

[Imagix]

Didn't the Silicon Indy (or was it the Onyx) have a 2 GB video card? Glancing over the specs, the SGI Onyx4 could have up to 8 GB of graphics memory. Note that these machines are on the order of a decade old.... Granted, not exactly home gear, but still this isn't the "World's First 2 GB Graphics Card". So in fine tradition... another thing that UNIX had already done 10 years ago. (Hmm... maybe it was closer to 15....)

Market need?

[electrosoccertux]

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?

Re:Wow..

[Tim C]

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.

Wolfenstein

[Nerdposeur]

Finally, I will be able to play Wolfenstein 3D in all its beautiful glory!

32-bit address space limitations

[Spatial]

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...

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[bucky0]

Graphics card memory won't be normally addressable with regular CPU opcodes, would they? You have to manually pipe data across the PCI/AGP/PCIe busses to make it to the card. They certainly don't sit in process address space.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[mrtonic]

You remember incorrectly.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_vista

Home Basic is capped at 8Gb, Home Premium at 16Gb, and Ultimate and Business at 128Gb

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[raijinsetsu]

I stand corrected. Vista Home Basic is capped at 8gb, and Ultimate at 128mb.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[MostAwesomeDude]

The framebuffer is typically memory-mapped. While it's possible to program a video card just through indirect DMA and the GPU's command processor, most systems need to map the framebuffer for part of startup, and generally there's no reason to unmap it.

Re:32-bit address space limitations

[Planky]

128mb? No wonder Vista runs like crap!

Pointless

[Teejaykay]

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.

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. :P

Moving the bar

[Shivetya]

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.

And also....

[DrYak]

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.

And maybe....

[DrYak]

...and maybe also playing Crysis 2.
With all settings put to "low".
And with Aero disabled.

Re:And maybe....

[Mr. Vage]

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.

Re:And maybe....

[Slime-dogg]

What happens when you're using dual monitors?

Re:Wow..

[dave420]

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.

Re:Better definition than real life.

[mikael]

The human eye has about 100 million rods and cones. You need a 100 megapixel framebuffer (around 10,000 by 10,000 pixels to achieve this.

There was an article in the Independent newspaper about Virtual Reality a long time ago. In the article, one of the researchers stated that photorealistic quality was defined as 80 million textured triangles/second.

Re:First Wii reference.

[Macthorpe]

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.

Re:Wow..

[Klaus_1250]

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.

Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[Molochi]

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.

Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure

[LionMage]

He never said that. He said about 1/3 of the top 15 cards are what the "Crysis Crowd" would call obsolete -- in other words, not "shiny Crysis material." He never said any of the cards in that list were "Crysis material."

Screw Gaming...

[Penguinisto]

...at least in this context. Now OTOH, 3D/CG render engines that have OpenGL-rendering can do a whole hell of a lot with a beefy GPU and 2GB of RAM.

Normally, compared to software (CPU) raytracing, OGL rendering is pretty crappy on vidcards with low resources (shadows are jaggy, etc)... but with enough RAM and a high-end GPU, quality and speed could approach (if not surpass) the old-school "click 'render' then go have lunch" routine that most CG artists deal with nowadays.

/P

I'm still not convinced

[Moraelin]

Except for the fact that this is what EQ1 did. Back when EQ1 launched, they *required* a 3D card. That was pure INSANITY according to the conventional wisdom at the time, because few single-player games required you to have a 3D card; most games had a software renderer, too, that looked like crap. This was back when 3Dfx was the top dog and you had to install Glide because DirectX wasn't quite up to snuff.

EQ1 was also the far better game at the time. Simply because the competition was even worse.

Since you mention UO, it was still a fucked-up, unbalanced, small, simplistic, gank-fest. The dynamic duo of self-centered narcisists, Lord British and his trusty sidekick Raph Koster (who'd later do the same with SWG) were still telling players what they should like, instead of even trying to notice what players actually want. Untested patches were issued that broke more than they fixed, and some had to be rolled back because they were a catastrophe. The fact that Lord British diverted the bug-fixing budget of UO to make Ultima 9, also didn't help.

And that's the short version. One could fill a tome with what was wrong with UO, and what got worse. It was only after EQ and AC ate their lunch big time, that Origin even started considering fixing their game.

If we're talking about looks and angular breasts, a lot of us actually thought that the 2D graphics of UO actually looked _better_ than the hideous 3D mess of EQ or AC. But UO just didn't give us what we wanted. So EQ won.

Don't mistake players for the circle-jerk clique of online reviewers. Reviewers seem to get outright orgasms over "OMG, it's shiny" or, back then, "OMG it's 3D". The average player cared a lot more about gameplay. EQ may bore you to tears by nowadays standards, but back then it was the best by a wide margin. Or rather: the competition was even worse. If you will, EQ2 won by being the one-eyed in the land of the blind.

And it seems to me like EQ2 is the result of just that kind of mistake. Sony got caught in the same mistaken belief that the servile "OMG, it's shiny" gang of reviewers actually represent the average gamer. And produced a game whose only merit was "OMG, it's shiny." And lost.

It just turns out that Warcraft was a stronger brand and ate Sony's lunch. Oops.

Brand only gets you so far. Star Wars was a bigger brand name than EQ and Warcraft _combined_, and it still got to be merely a niche game. The Sims had sold more copies than all Warcraft games _and_ Everquest _combined_, and it outright flopped. Etc.

Basically a crap game with a good franchise, still flops.

And if we're talking about EQ vs Warcraft, actually I remember it the other way around. Sony was _the_ big name in MMOs and everyone expected EQ2 to be teh uber-game that sweeps everyone off their feet. Blizzard was just another unproven "me too." People wanted a Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 from them, not a MMO. The reaction to Blizzard's announcement that they're making a MMO was _disappointment_, not "yay, I'm preordering it because it's Warcraft." The average Warcraft player was a RTS player, and was just about as looking forward to an MMO as to root canal.

So, no, Sony was the bigger name there, and it lost anyway.

WoW had high detailed textures, but relatively low polygon counts for the models.

High detailed is relative. By comparison to EQ2, which is what I was trying to do, WoW is a lot lower res. Or at least EQ2 needed 512 MB for max details, WoW ran decently on an 128 MB card. If that's not due to textures, well, I'm curious what it was.