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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.
Great for the pointless eye-candy first-person shooters. For everything else, there's MasterCard.
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?
Workstation cards have been multi-gigabyte for ages! the ATI FireGL V8650 which was released a while ago is 2GB.
Somehow I don't think that those two billion transistors will be cool.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?