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NVIDIA Makes First 4GB Graphics Card
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 10, 2008 10:05 AM
from the making-everything-else-cheaper dept.
from the making-everything-else-cheaper dept.
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.
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Submission: NVIDIA Makes First 4GB Graphics Card by Anonymous Coward
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Just what I always wanted! (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
That you are using an old operating system incapable of dealing with this new hardware is not the fault of nVidia.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The sort of person still running a 32 bit OS is not from the same set as those who might spend $3k on the latest and greatest hardware. You don't matter to them.
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The days of the graphics card mapping all it's memory into PCI address space at once are over and have been for some time. IIRC modern cards use a movable window of 256MB or so for access to graphics card ram from the rest of the system.
How did this retarded comment get upmodded? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, people. If you're going to buy such an expensive professional card, you're going to go with a professional-grade operating system, which will of course be 64-bit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
32-bit is dead. It should have been dead 4 years ago...
Any serious computer enthusiast or professional running a 32bit os on today's hardware should be ashamed. They're holding the industry back.
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Re:Just what I always wanted! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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64-bit Vista, 64-bit Kubuntu on the gaming computer. Theoretically, all the Macs should also be 64-bit. 32-bit is dead to me :)
History repeats... (Score:2, Informative)
I am reminded of old 3DFx advertisments just before they went belly-up.
what a revolution (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean we can finally run Crysis now?
Re:what a revolution (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Others say that the developers have in fact already done this several times.
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Nope, but you can run Vista.
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Almost.
cool (Score:2)
i've always wanted to watch wall-e as it is being rendered in real-time
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not gonna happen, RenderMan is CPU-only.
no it's not (Score:5, Funny)
... "the most powerful video card in history", it's "the most powerful videocard yet".
[/pet peeve]
Re:no it's not (Score:4, Funny)
I dunno, those Germans made quite a powerful video card back in the 1940s.
It certainly had more power than those steam-powered video cards the French made in WWI.
Parent
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Wrong closing tag.
You mean [/pedant].
Re: (Score:2)
maybe you should call Guinness Book of World Records and tell them that all their records are incorrect. or you could, you know, stop being such a pedant.
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"the most powerful video card in history", it's "the most powerful videocard yet".
FACT: The Rebel Alliance used significantly more powerful videocards to render the Death Star in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
FACT: This event occured a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
[/pet peeve]
Not for home users (Score:3, Informative)
you're all confused (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
That's Awesome. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the great thing about video cards. Even a card that's two generations old is a terrific card, and they're fantastically cheap.
Headlines (Score:2)
Old news (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't a gaming card
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, AMD's Stream [amd.com] technology. I don't think it is used as much as CUDA in practice.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically, nvidia behavior is generating a lot of hate in coders community...
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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I have switched sides twice during that time, have had bad cards from both manufacturers during the last 5 years and will continue to now buy based on individual product reviews.
The landscape for most hi-tech products seems to change so quickly now, and suppliers / manufacturers change at such short notice that it is no longer possible to rely upon a vendor's name as a sign of quality.
In the worst cases, even the same product with the same part number is a different product with different performance charac
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However, there is hope. The Vista failure is biting Microsoft in the ass so hopefully this will also happen in a way for nVidia and give us some OSS drivers. If everything else fails, there is st
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are technically correct.
Now, the next question is this: Is the class of problems caused by the existance of a monopoly restricted to situations where a market actor meets the strict definition of a monopoly that you gave?
The answer is no, and anti-trust law in the United States recognizes that. Therefore, you can be convicted of "abusing monopoly power" without technically being a monopoly. Since strict monopolies basically never occur in nature without government interference (and even then you could
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Funny)
I like how statistics are so meaningless we're not even putting the numbers in anymore.
Parent
Re:Power != memory (Score:4, Funny)
This is a new age of statistics. Instead of putting numbers up there that could be misinterpreted, the author has chosen to take the politically correct route and allow the user the decision that best pleases them.
This way you get your message out, and the person on the other side is happy with their decision. It's a win-win!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Still a .01% increase over the competition.
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Power != memory (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Power != memory (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Cm'on, we are all grown ups here. You can say it clearly:
It's for high-detailed 3D virtual porn.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at the video games, they keep trying to add flaws and blemishes everywhere to make it look real.
In X years they won't be able to compete with perfect skin from virtual actors. So why bother?
Given the porn market has people going for strange stuff, I'm sure there would be a fair number who would actually prefer their porn stars to have a tiny bit of hair stubble, slight blemishes etc.
For the "perfect" stuff, they'll probably still have jobs providing original moti
Re:Power != memory (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Umm, the GeForce GTX 280, a gamer card released last summer, also has 240 "cores" (as Nvidia counts them; actually stream processors).
This workstation card, as you might expect, is essentially the same thing as the consumer card, just tweaked towards the professional market (more RAM, different drivers). It's nothing especially innovative.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Are you some kind of idiot?
With 4GB of graphics memory and 240 CUDA-programmable parallel cores
That alone should be a plain indicator that this ISN'T a consumer-level card, nor is it even remotely close to being targeted as such by nvidia.
Re:Power != memory (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Parent
Re:Power != memory (Score:4, Informative)
Two reasons:
One is simply that the cards use memory that isn't available normally. They don't use normal DDR RAM, they use special RAM for graphics cards, called GDDR. It is similar but not the same as memory in systems. Thus you can't just go out and buy sticks of RAM for it. So they'd have to be made special for the cards (and each gen of card uses different RAM), and thus would be expensive.
The bigger one is that the RAM is really pushed to the limit. You start to run in to all sorts of shit you never thought about. The electrical properties of the connection are highly important and there is a difference between what you get soldered on to traces and in a socket.
It's a nice thought, but not practical these days. Graphics cards are heavily dependent on high RAM bandwidth and you get that by really pushing the envelope. That means new RAM technologies all the time and the chips being pushed to the max.
Parent
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Re:misread the subject (Score:5, Funny)
I read that as 4*MB* video card.
I fucking hate the beginning of work weeks.
Working hard, I see.
Parent