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.

Comments

Just what I always wanted!

[Jaysyn]

A video card I can't use on XP32 since it can't properly allocate that much VRAM & system RAM at the same time.

Re:Just what I always wanted!

[IanCal]

If you're doing scientific computing requiring about 4 gigs of ram, and need the processing power of current-gen graphics cards then you should be able to figure out how to migrate from XP32 to 64 bit.

That you are using an old operating system incapable of dealing with this new hardware is not the fault of nVidia.

what a revolution

[jollyreaper]

Does this mean we can finally run Crysis now?

Re:what a revolution

[dreamchaser]

Oh come on, you can run Crysis with half that number of cores and only 2 gig of video RAM. This card is obviously being built because of the impending release of Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Power != memory

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Yes, AMD's Stream technology. I don't think it is used as much as CUDA in practice.

you're all confused

[DragonTHC]

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.

Re:Power != memory

[Ephemeriis]

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.

Re:Power != memory

[LearnToSpell]

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.