Pushing The 512MB Barrier On Video Cards

Hack Jandy writes "Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory? ATI is pushing the texture barrier by incorporating 512MB in their newest X850 video card lineup. The catch? Even ATI acknowledges there will probably be no performance benefits to bumping the memory support from 256MB to 512MB as the cards are 'intended to demonstrate the next-generation capability to gamers." An anonymous reader points out that Gainward (which sells NVidia-based graphics cards), will shortly introduce its own 512MB card, according to Hexus.net.

Well make it useful in a creative way

[FerretFrottage]

Why not create special drivers that allow you to use the unused vid ram as a ramdisk? If a game requires more than 256MB, then default the temp area back to file storage, but if you are only using 128-256MB for video, then let me do something useful with the remainder.

A use for this

[ZWheel]

I seem to remember someone writing a linux kernel module that lets you use extra video mem as a very fast virtual drive.

possible max

[BibelBiber]

What would actually be the possible maximum for graphic cards memory to use in terms of texture and so on. Is it depending on screen solution or on other things?

Scientific Applications

[ghoti]

This may not do much for games, but for scientific applications, especially visualization of large datasets, this is great. The visualization community has been using the advances made for gaming over the last years, and it's amazing what you can now do on the GPU: flow simulation, interactive visualization of large volumetric datasets with complex transfer functions, shading, etc.
For these applications, the more memory, the better.

Old fart...

[stefanb]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Boy, was I happy when I got my Video 7 VRAM card with a whopping 512 kilobyte of RAM... but this is so long ago, it doesn't seem real anymore.

Cue Monty Python "uphill both ways, and we liked it" skit...

General GPU Programming

[mjinman]

The move might not matter a whole lot to the normal gamer, but those of us who are researching/using video cards as fast vector coprocessors love this as it increases the matrix (texture) size we can do operations on. (I especially love it since some of my stuff runs 40x on my Radeon X800 than my Athlon 64 - its all linear algrebra, finite difference codes)

Almost Absurd

[ewhac]

"Would you like to mount unused graphics RAM as a swap device?"

Seriously, what's all that RAM used for when you're not playing games? It's still eating power; you may as well use it for something...

Schwab

Okay...

[ndykman]

Wow. It really says something about the gaming market when you have a card whose outward specifications looks like a P3 machine (and a nice one). 540Mhz Core (CPU) Clock, 512MB of memory. And of course, lots of overclocking.

Here's a question. When will the GPU companies have to start playing tricks when the clock speeds finally give way to things like, oh, trying to cool a damn computer on a card without sounding like a jet plane is in your room becomes an issue. Like, well, now?

In my day...

[William_Lee]

We didn't use separate memory for video processing...

We used custom video coprocessors named Denise running at 7 mhz and we liked it.

Back then we didn't need all these fancy colors, 4096 was plenty!

Who had more RAM?

[dpilot]

When I first got my G400 and plugged it into my K6-3, the G400 had 32MB and the K6-3 had 64MB. That the two are in the same ballpark seems crazy.

Now the K6-3 is still in service, though upgraded to 192MB. But the new GEForce we got for the kids' computer (equipped with 512MB) came with 256MB, more than my main desktop, and half as much as it's resident machine.

On a more serious note, it would be interesting to understand how transient the data in that graphics card is, and how much main memory you need in the PC in order to pump enough data into the graphics card to really use all of that graphics ram.

Re:No performance benefits?

[Neophytus]

That's more like it - games being designed beyond current specs! I'm sick of finding a game looks "dated" not a few months after it's release because the developers capped the top specs at what I can still run on (admittedly good) 2003 hardware.

Re:Is there any benefit

[TLLOTS]

Actually there is, but you'll only like to see any real benefit in terms of games etc. at a much later date since games are typically created for the most common hardware, not the best hardware. I have no doubt that in time there will be many many games that will demand over 1GB of ram on our graphics cards, but that will be sometime off.

Of course with other applications for graphics cards being sought now as well, using them in scientific computing tasks etc. this may very well be useful even today. I guess time shall tell ultimately.

Re:512 is better

[NanoGator]

"If my email tells me anything, size DOES matterI find most of the realism comes from the physics engine. The texture just makes it look a bit prettier, but by no means makes the game any better."

I didn't say it makes the game better. And yes, I should have defined 'realism' a little more clearly. I meant the rendered visuals of it, not the motion of it. You can do a lot more to make an image 'photo-real' with greater texture resolution than you can do with faster processing etc. Ask anybody who's played Doom 3. The normal mapping in that game, love it loathe it, did a great deal more to the visual detail of the game than adding a few more polygons to the scene.

So.....

[TrevorB]

If it has 512MB of memory, and a hefty GPU, can it run Linux?

My memory increases

[famazza]

• 1992 - 286 (third world country) - Trident 256KB
• 
  1995 - 486 - Trident 1MB
  2001 - K6II - Diamond 32 MB
  2004 - Atlhon XP - ATi 128 MB
  

Probably I'll reach 512 MB in 2010.

My card

[pyro_dude]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

No. I am still using the ATI All in Wonder that I found mispriced at $30 instead of $180 at CompUSA (and they had no problem giving it to me at the lower price, even when I informed them about it). It must be from the late 90s, cause I have upgraded just about all my stuff except my speakers since I got my computer in 98, but that has remained the same. It has 8 MB of memory.

And yet I have now gotten a Viewsonic monitor [viewsonic.com], which the card can keep running at 1600x1200/87/16 bpp flawlessly, plus the card's TV tuner lets me watch all the Knicks games (or whatever I prefer, I don't watch much TV these days) I want on the 21" screen that tops out my old 13" TV set.

I see no reason to buy a new graphics card. (If I weren't a pure coder, maybe I'd upgrade it for games, but I generally dont do much gaming, certainly not anything mainstream.)

The real kicker is, if I had sent in the $20 rebate, all this would have cost me only $10.

Use the extra memory for 3D Models

[DarrinWest]

I would like to be able to use this memory to store the 3D models. Anything to get stuff off the front side bus. If there is room for models *and* textures on the graphics card, the only thing on the FSB are camera commands and model modification requests.

I would be interested in seeing what effect that decompositoin would have on data rates. How big are the BSP trees describing a scene? What is the tipping point where it makes sense to download the models and modify them in place?

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[TheRaven64]

While this might be almost sensible with PCI-Express, AGP is horribly slow at transferring data from the card to the system (the screen is a write-only device, and AGP was designed taking this into account).

Re:Scientific Applications

[graphicsguy]

You are just wrong. Consumer cards have much better price/performance. In fact, the workstation cards by NVIDIA, for example, do not offer much beyond the consumer cards. They operate at lower clock rates for much more money. Other vendors' workstation cards may offer more VRAM and certification, but generally lack the cutting edge programmability features (which are definitely used for scientific visualization).

Re:Never had one.

[Waffle Iron]

I don't remember about CGA, but the original IBM EGA cards (precursors to the VGA) had 128K. They used a stupid non-square 640x350 aspect ration to fit it into physical video RAM at 4 bits per pixel, and they used an unbelievably insane logic scheme to map it into bus memory space at 1 bit per pixel.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[kesuki]

and PCI-express was written realizing the modern GPU has 300 million transistors.. and even if they're specifically programmed for manipulating graphical data, there are a lot of Professional Graphic Content Creation programs that could benefit greatly from having a 300 million transistor co-processor when rendering. So AGP was written quite shortsightedly in making the connection primarily one directional.

ECC Video RAM

[Gary Destruction]

Okay, sure, the idea might sound stupid but more and stuff is being off-loaded to video cards and 512MB of RAM is alot.
There's programs you can download to test system memory, but I haven't seen any to test video memory. I know the professioal strength ones like Microscope and Troubleshooter can test video memory, but those full blown diagnostics programs.
You wouldn't believe the damage that bad video RAM can cause. And the whole time, you'd swear it was the system memory. Example, if you have a video card with bad video RAM and you increase the Iopagelocklimit on say Windows 2000, to 8000 hex (32k pages), you'll get all kinds of programs and system processes crashing. Userinit.exe might not even work when you try to log in. Services will fail, lots of em. Remember those blank windows in win98 that said the task isn't responding? It's Winoldap.mod that's hanging and I've found that faulty video RAM is usually the culprit.

Re:General GPU Programming

[WasterDave]

Ah, good. Someone that actually does this.

What's the precision like? Good? Good enough?

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Never had one.

[plover]

My 80 column mono card didn't have its own memory. It used a 2KB memory mapped area of the main system RAM. Over an 8-bit ISA bus.

You kids and your fancy-schmancy color graphics adapters. Pah!

Re:No performance benefits?

[rmarll]

Everquest II wants 512 mb for their max setting as well. And it will probably help a *lot* performance wise as the drop off in performance as image quality improves is significant.

For games, while a little improvement of texture resolution can help some, the real benefit (IMHO) will be in variation of textures. MMORPG type games (such as Everquest II) have a much more noticeable issue with limited ram. Most of the variation in second gen titles have worked around some of this with geometry and tinting instead of textures, but there is still a lot of sameness in the games.

This is also an issue for other types of games. Repeating textures and armies of cloned combatants are a couple of examples of working with limited texture space. Developers have more of a choice in presenting even sharper images and/or greater variety of images in their games.

Re:L2 larger than my first disk drive already.

[AJWM]

The ironic thing about those old 1541 drives (and the 1540, which just had earlier firmware), was that they had more processing power than the C64 it connected to.

The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[mc6809e]

If nothing actually uses that memory. For example, if you had 15TB of RAM (I don't like over-exaggerating), the vast majority would be doing nothing, hence it wouldn't be helpful.

It depends on what you mean by "doing nothing".

With 15TB you could do massive pre-computation of scene details. When it came time to render, you could access some part of the 15TB for real-time display. Your interactions with the scene might mean that you never get near accessing a total of 15TB, but all the data needs to be there just in case.

So, is it doing nothing just because you might never access it?

Re:Almost Absurd

[Queer Boy]

Seriously, what's all that RAM used for when you're not playing games?

Compositing and texturing my windows and desktop. [apple.com]

The potential for 3D textures is stunning

[emarkp]

I work on scientific visualization software (using OpenGL). We're looking into 3D textures for volumetric rendering, and trust me, the 512MB could be used easily.