World's First 2GB Graphics Card Is Here 400
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.
A much more informative link.. (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.powercolor.com/eng/NewsInfo.asp?id=259
That's cool but... (Score:3, Informative)
The R700 has dual GPUs on a single board, competes very well with nVidia, and here's the really cool part: It has nearly TWO BILLION transistors.
"FIRST" 2GB card? Err... (Score:5, Informative)
UNIX did it a decade ago (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what a load of drivel (Score:1, Informative)
CounterStrike didn't have a physics engine. CounterStrike didn't have a graphics engine. It piggybacked off Half-Life, made by Valve, using heavily tweaked Quake2 engines from id.
So...if you want to exclude the foundation of what makes the game work, sure, CS was a small team project
Re:32-bit address space limitations (Score:3, Informative)
Graphics card memory won't be normally addressable with regular CPU opcodes, would they? You have to manually pipe data across the PCI/AGP/PCIe busses to make it to the card. They certainly don't sit in process address space.
Re:32-bit address space limitations (Score:2, Informative)
err, Vista Ultimate is capped at -128- gigs of RAM, thank you very much. And even if it was capped at 8, it would be enough for a 4 gigs + this card setup.
Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh? (Score:2, Informative)
But you are right, this is MEMORY, more models/animations = more memory requirements = bigger maps. So yes this is needed (eventually), add to the fact that physics is now being implemented in GPUs (I have only briefly touched the code, which doesn't seem to take much additional memory though).
I think the biggest gain in 2gb memory is the map sizes for games. Polygon count can also be increased in models as well, as well as higher definition texture levels (I still have yet to understand the difference between "low" "medium" "high" texture, as if there's actually a standard that one has "x" extra resolution/colors.) Maybe someday we will get to the extra super high def texture level where you can zoom in and see the "atoms" or skin cells when you look at characters...as if that will be necessary?
Re:Bottlenecks? (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine a city with a limited road budget. The industrial areas (devices) have priority over residential areas (system RAM), so some residential areas are left without road access.
This is why there is an average usable limit of 3-3.5GB of RAM in most 32bit systems. You can have 4gb of RAM, but the system still needs to allocate space to the other devices so it can interact with them. This also has to do with DMA, direct memory access, that enables devices to directly access ram (bypassing the CPU) to make Input/Output operations faster.
Thus, 2gb, even 1gb, video cards are quite useless until 64bit is the norm. Any game that would require 1gb of video memory will most likely need more than 2gb of system ram, as history has shown relating video memory to system ram requirements in games.
Re:32-bit address space limitations (Score:2, Informative)
You remember incorrectly.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_vista [microsoft.com]
Home Basic is capped at 8Gb, Home Premium at 16Gb, and Ultimate and Business at 128Gb
Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's pointless for FPS style games. They'll never use even a GB of that memory effectively because the games are designed around people with 512MB at the high end.
They're only doing this because DDR3 is much cheaper than the DDR5 on the 4870. A 2GB 4850 with DDR3 is cheaper than a 1GB 4870 with DDR5. Me, I can't see the value of getting a card with more than 1GB, even for future games.
The only reason I see to buy this card is maybe there are drivers optimized for professional work where the memory requirements are much higher (3D modelers and the like).
There won't be. This card is marketed as a 4850, not a FireGL, which means it won't be all that useful or professionals. Without the drivers to accelerate professional applications, the extra memory is largely useless.
4GB of Memory on the Tesla C1060 (Score:1, Informative)
The Tesla C1060 has 4GB of Memory. It is still a graphics card.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_c1060.html
Re:32-bit address space limitations (Score:2, Informative)
Re:32-bit address space limitations (Score:3, Informative)
The framebuffer is typically memory-mapped. While it's possible to program a video card just through indirect DMA and the GPU's command processor, most systems need to map the framebuffer for part of startup, and generally there's no reason to unmap it.
Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
but I believe AA (anti-aliasing) is after processing to a scene
There are a number of ways to do anti-aliasing but IIRC the common way is to oversample, that is generate the output in a higher resoloution than will be output and then downsample it.
If you have a 2560x1920 monitor and oversample by 4 times in each direction you would be generating in 10240x7680. That would mean you would need over 300 megs just for the output buffer. I'm not sure if current cards could handle that at a reasonable framerate anyway though.
Afaict the big thing putting pressure on graphics memory is texture detail, if you double the horizontal and vertical resoloution of your texture you quadruple the memory required to store it. Ideally you want enough memory on your graphics card to store all the textures the game uses on the card. Texture detail is something the game developer can fairly easilly allow the user to alter, just design the textures in the highest resoloution and allow those with weaker hardware to select downsampled versions.
Re:And maybe.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure (Score:5, Informative)
This is in support of your argument. Every quarter or so I do the Valve hardware survey that logs our gaming systems' specs so that they can get a handle on what paying customers are using. The top 15 right now are...
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 166,588 9.37 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 101,218 5.70 %
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 95,619 5.38 %
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 79,478 4.47 %
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 64,704 3.64 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 59,544 3.35 %
ATI Radeon 9600 54,727 3.08 %
ATI Radeon 9200 45,585 2.57 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 44,134 2.48 %
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 42,834 2.41 %
ATI Radeon X1950 41,533 2.34 %
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 40,839 2.30 %
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 38,990 2.19 %
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 36,192 2.04 %
ATI Radeon X800 35,449 1.99 %
About 1/3 of the top 15 cards are what the "Oooo Shiny Crysis Crowd" would call obsolete, and frankly the presence of a DX7 card even raises my eyebrow. This is the target audience for a powerful graphics card, but if Valve wants to sell to their customer base they can look at this and think, "Gee, maybe we should make a game that doesn't require a fuckton of curiously high bandwidth LMNOPRAM.and maybe make a fun game that at least scales down well.
Re:2GB of memory for a videocard, eh? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well.
That's exactly what I meant. You can attach all the memory you want to a video card, true, but there is a limit to how much you can conceivably use.
When you use more memory, you use more memory bandwidth; this is an undisputable fact. If you double the resolution of textures in a scene, the texture memory bandwidth you need to render that scene doubles. If you double your resolution, the amount of framebuffer writes doubles.
Since memory bandwidth is finite, you can only add so much before it becomes worthless. This is why the 2GB would be FAR MORE useful on a DDR5 card like the 4870, or else the GTX 280 with a 512-bit memory bus.
Don't get me wrong; the 4850 has just enough memory bandwidth to perform efficiently in it's current configuration, and I like it so much I bought one myself. But anything above 1GB on the 4850 will be wasted, because you cannot magically increase the bandwidth.
Heh, you don't have to tell me that we'll always need MORE MEMORY. My first 3D accelerator featured an amazing 4MB of memory! But along the same line as above, I wouldn't have put 16MB of ram on my first card, because it would have been worthless with the limited 64-bit bus.
Re:Somehow, I'm not that sure (Score:3, Informative)
He never said that. He said about 1/3 of the top 15 cards are what the "Crysis Crowd" would call obsolete -- in other words, not "shiny Crysis material." He never said any of the cards in that list were "Crysis material."