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NVIDIA Makes First 4GB Graphics Card
Frogger writes to tell us NVIDIA has released what they are calling the most powerful graphics card in history. With 4GB of graphics memory and 240 CUDA-programmable parallel cores, this monster sure packs a punch, although, with a $3,500 price tag, it certainly should. Big-spenders can rejoice at a new shiny, and the rest of us can be happy with the inevitable price shift in the more reasonable models.
A video card I can't use on XP32 since it can't properly allocate that much VRAM & system RAM at the same time.
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Does this mean we can finally run Crysis now?
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Yes, AMD's Stream technology. I don't think it is used as much as CUDA in practice.
... "the most powerful video card in history", it's "the most powerful videocard yet".
[/pet peeve]
Or maybe there are companies that need high end cards with 4GB of RAM. This isn't some trick to get consumers to pay more for a low end card. This is now Nvidia's highest end workstation card.
I read that as 4*MB* video card.
I fucking hate the beginning of work weeks.
Working hard, I see.
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I don't believe anyone claimed this was a gaming card.
This is a scientific number cruncher. Its use is in visual computer modeling for anything from weather models to physics models.
How about folding@home? this does it faster than any computer on the block.
All of you kids making jokes about crysis are missing the point. This might run games, but it's a science processor first.
They're using their grammar skills there.
excuse me but this is total bullshit. oldest trick in the book. if you are behind in technology, pop out a card with huge ram and try to get some sales.
lets face it. nvidia has fallen behind ati in the chip race. you can place any number of 4870s in a setup as much as you like to equate the power of any monolithic nvidia card and they always kick the living daylights out of that nvidia card in terms of cost/performance per unit of processing power.
In case the $3,500 price tag didn't tip you off, this isn't a gaming/enthusiast card. This is a Quadro - a professional card for high-end 3D rendering. Stuff like generating film-grade 3D or insane CAD stuff. Actually, due to the design of the card, it'd be pretty horrible at playing games.
This thing is aimed at high-end scientific calculation and professional-grade rendering.
ATI may, or may not, have something comparable. ATI may even have something better. I don't know, I don't follow the GPU industry very closely. But claiming that they're just slapping a bunch of RAM on a card to drum up sales is just plain wrong. Hell, the blurb here on Slashdot even mentions the fact that it has 240 cores.
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Coder Hate like that brought by the shitty, bug filled drivers that ATI has a long history with?
I think ATI/AMD is on the right path, but they have a long history of being on the wrong path, while NVIDIA has always been more towards the middle (Not completely right, but not too badly wrong). It'll take some time before I jump to the ATI Bandwagon as completely as you obviously have.
That's times more powerfull and flexible than CUDA.
I like how statistics are so meaningless we're not even putting the numbers in anymore.
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There is no upper limit on the amount of memory required for tasks like volume visualisation, where you have a nice big 3D cube of data in 16-bit format. A cube 1024 voxels in each dimension with a single channel of 16-bit data (2 bytes) is going to be 2 Gigabytes. You will need at least two such cubes to do any sort of image processing work.
Even a digital movie can be considered to be a cube if you consider time as the 3rd dimension.
Rather than having cards with a fixed amount of VRAM, which can't manufacturers just put a bunch of memory card sockets on the card and allow users to add memory when they want?
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meaning you can code directly the hardware
Guess what CUDA and Stream have been designed for? Yes: for programming the hardware. What you suggest is pure insanity. NEVER EVER touch hardware directly from an userland app. And once you start writing a kernel module, you end up with something like CUDA/Stream anyway.
I am a coder, and quite frankly I couldn't care less about nvidia drivers being closed source. They are MUCH better than the ATI ones, especially in the OpenGL department. nvidia whipped up a beta GL 3.0 driver in less than a month since GL3 specs were released. ATI? Nope. New standardized feature X is added to the registry. nvidia adds it pretty quickly; ATI adds it months, even years later. nvidia drivers are also pretty robust; I can bombard them with faulty OpenGL code, and they remain standing. With ATI's fglrx, even CORRECT code can cause malfunctioning.
THESE are the things I care about. Not the license.
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Do you realize that for computers 12+ years is several GENERATIONS?
I had always been using ATI for Windows boxes and laptops, since my main concern was almost always video performance and TV-Out capability and I could not even get a video overlay work over TV-out with nVidia cards for years.
Of course, when I had problems with linux drivers I built nVidia (I admit, even intel) linux boxes. But that is a thing of the past, I am back to ATI for linux, they are good and even getting better with each release.
Anyway, long term loyalties is pretty silly. I bought my K6 233 at the same price my friend bought his MMX 166, in retrospect we all know how those two compare. I kept on buying Athlons when others were paying more for their crap P4's (they weren't called crap back when it was the best intel had to offer). But, hey, I am now buying Core 2 for non-low end systems, until AMD can come up with something better.
Fanboyism gets you bad deals at least half of the time. You buy hardware, you don't marry it. Ok, I know this is slashdot and the last statement might generate some debate, but anyway you get the point.
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