512mb GPU

[(V)uFFy]

Hey guys ive heard that ati is planning to release a 512mb GPU soon so i was wondering if any one gots any information on that cause id like to read about that.

 

[yevaud]

If by soon you mean by the end of the year, I would doubt it would be 512mb of DDR3. More likely it'll be a 512mb DDR card aimed at the public who sees the "512mb" on the box and starts reaching for the plastic.
Expect both Nvidia and ATI to release 512mb DDR3 parts at the next refresh..not before.

 

[SoLiD_MasteR]

All 256mb owners will tell you the same thing "there is no 512 this year"


BULL****


ATi next generation cards will lunch on October with 512 mb

 

[LiquidX]

All 256mb owners will tell you the same thing "there is no 512 this year"


BULL****


ATi next generation cards will lunch on October with 512 mb

And pigs will fly.

 

[Bugalaman]

heh, the gpu doesn't contain the memory. If it did, what the hell did I put my ramsinks on? lol

 

[jonavin]

Hey guys ive heard that ati is planning to release a 512mb GPU soon so i was wondering if any one gots any information on that cause id like to read about that.

Nvidia already have one available, it's call NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4400 PCI-Express Card that have 512MB of DDR-3. Ofcourse you are looking at $1000+ card since these are made for graphic workstations

 

[yevaud]

All 256mb owners will tell you the same thing "there is no 512 this year"


BULL****


ATi next generation cards will lunch on October with 512 mb

ATI and Nvidia are having major problems getting the current generation out the door because of difficulty obtaining DDR3 and you think they will launch next gen with twice as much of the precious stuff while the cards are going for 10-50% over MSRP? WOW.

 

[nst6563]

ATI and Nvidia are having major problems getting the current generation out the door because of difficulty obtaining DDR3 and you think they will launch next gen with twice as much of the precious stuff while the cards are going for 10-50% over MSRP? WOW.

No one ever said that the marketing decisions of large corporations had to make sense...much less be able to deliver on them...

 

[rancor]

Its not a ram shortage that is causing the slow release, if that was the case the gt and ultra would be in shortage just like ATi's xt pe.

this revision should have 512 mb cards. I don't think its really necessary to buy 512 mb cards yet though, its going to be another year or so before that much vram would be usable.

 

[nst6563]

I don't think its really necessary to buy 512 mb cards yet though,
this revision shoul its going to be another year or so before that much vram would be usable.

Doom 3 can already make use of 512Mb video ram. I'm sure if HL2 is even half of what it's being reported to be, it will be able to make use of 512mb also.

People were saying the same thing about cards with 256mb 6 months ago.

 

[LiquidX]

Doom 3 can already make use of 512Mb video ram. I'm sure if HL2 is even half of what it's being reported to be, it will be able to make use of 512mb also.

People were saying the same thing about cards with 256mb 6 months ago.

I really dont think Doom 3 needs that much video ram at all and the same for HL2. This talk about Doom needing 512mb video ram to run ultra even smooth is way over rated. Ultra runs very smooth on my system, but heh maybe I missing something.

 

[guilTy]

512 video cards have been around for a while, granted they are workstation cards, but hey...

3dlabs VP990 is one i can think of off the top of my head that has been out for a little over a year(i think, corrct me if i am wrong)

 

[rancor]

yep 3dlabs has em the quadros will too. Doom 3 really doesn't need 512 mb of vram. Half life 2 definitly doesn't either. Both these games were made for very backward systems.

 

[Mushroom Prince]

Hey guys ive heard that ati is planning to release a 512mb GPU soon so i was wondering if any one gots any information on that cause id like to read about that.

Why because you think that 512 mb video cards are some sort of importance right now ? Like its some sort of technology that doesn't exist as of the moment but you need it for doom3 anyways ?

 

[nst6563]

I really dont think Doom 3 needs that much video ram at all and the same for HL2. This talk about Doom needing 512mb video ram to run ultra even smooth is way over rated. Ultra runs very smooth on my system, but heh maybe I missing something.

No one said you NEEDED the 512mb, just that it CAN utilize it. They way it utilizes it is by using uncompressed texture maps. Your 256mb card may run D3 Ultra nice and smooth, but it's using compressed textures to do so. If you're not using compressed textures, then you're swapping out memory like crazy to utilize the uncompressed textures.

Difference in image quality? None really if you're actually playing the game and not mesmorized by the pretty pictures and light maps.

But why not get a card w/512mb ram on it if you have the money and they're available?? If you plan on keeping the card for longer than 1 year...I'd say it's worth it.

but like I said before, 6 months ago people were scoffing at the 256mb cards saying there's no need (of course there wasn't...especially on a 5200fx or 9600pro)...well...I'd venture to say that D3 and HL2 may run a little smoother and higher IQ with that 256mb now (even on a 9600xt)....same thing applies to 512mb...and then a year from now we'll be saying the same thing about having 768mb on a video card...and then 1gb...and it just keeps on going......until we get an interface installed on our heads that we can simply plug into and the game software actually generates the electrical impulses to fire the synapses in our brains to generate crystal clear and perfect pictures in full color and motion (no blurs from shotty high ms rated LCD's from a no-name company).

 

[DemonDiablo]

......until we get an interface installed on our heads that we can simply plug into and the game software actually generates the electrical impulses to fire the synapses in our brains to generate crystal clear and perfect pictures in full color and motion (no blurs from shotty high ms rated LCD's from a no-name company).

nice imagination...watch alittle to much SciFi imo

Oh and one possibly two games is hardly an argument at saying 256mb cards are finaly seeing purpose in the present time over 128mb cards. Taking out Doom 3 and possibly Half Life and Far Cry there hasnt been a game yet that made more than like 1fps difference between a 256mb card and a 128mb card

 

[nst6563]

nice imagination...watch alittle to much SciFi imo

Oh and one possibly two games is hardly an argument at saying 256mb cards are finaly seeing purpose in the present time over 128mb cards. Taking out Doom 3 and possibly Half Life and Far Cry there hasnt been a game yet that made more than like 1fps difference between a 256mb card and a 128mb card

my point was 6 months ago people were scoffing at the idea...now games are starting to come out that CAN utilize that much memory. As long as manufacturer's continue to make these high perf. cards with lots of memory on them, game developers will continue to make newer games to utilize it.

it may be 2-3 games now, but in a few months time, that number may grow to 10 or more...possible more if they're using the same engines as Farcry, HL2, D3, etc and just pile on the huge-assed textures

 

[Dig1tal_Pr0be]

nice imagination...watch alittle to much SciFi imo

The military/industrial complex is traditionally 20 years or so ahead of what we know about- you think they ain't working on that type of interface?

 

[nst6563]

The military/industrial complex is traditionally 20 years or so ahead of what we know about- you think they ain't working on that type of interface?

I want one. since humans supposedly only use 10% of their brains to begin with, I may as well use the rest for saved game storage and DVD rips right???

 

[Digital Viper-X-]

All 256mb owners will tell you the same thing "there is no 512 this year"


BULL****


ATi next generation cards will lunch on October with 512 mb

Did you miss the whole part whre ATI said they will release a new Generation every 24months and refreshes every 6 ?

 

[yevaud]

Well, this thread is just turning silly now. I am aware that high end cards have been out for quite some time with more than 256mb of ram. Until the most recent Quadro FX4400 there have been none with GDDR3. I have yet to see anyone buy one of these expensive cards and try to flash it to a 6800Ultra, but that may be possible. Other than that, these workstation cards suck for gaming. Now someone said that 512mb cards will be out in October. There's just no way. Not going to happen (period).
If either manufacturer pulls out a 512mb part by the end of the year, It is guaranteed to be a paper launch. people may have been "scoffing" at 256 megs 6? months ago, but realize that 128 meg cards had been on the market for 3+ years. Why would you think they would jump from 256 to 512 in 3 months? It just ain't gonna happen.

 

[RAutrey]

my point was 6 months ago people were scoffing at the idea...now games are starting to come out that CAN utilize that much memory. As long as manufacturer's continue to make these high perf. cards with lots of memory on them, game developers will continue to make newer games to utilize it.

it may be 2-3 games now, but in a few months time, that number may grow to 10 or more...possible more if they're using the same engines as Farcry, HL2, D3, etc and just pile on the huge-assed textures

Agreed. Purchasing a card with the greatest amount of memory available is about the best way to "future proof" your purchase (if there is such a thing). I bought a GF3 w/ 128mb many moons ago when everyone was saying I didn't need 128mb of memory and just recently retired it from one of my secondary rigs. I could play everything at 1024x768 with medium quality settings, less Doom 3.

 

[Krycek1]

Nvidia already have one available, it's call NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4400 PCI-Express Card that have 512MB of DDR-3. Ofcourse you are looking at $1000+ card since these are made for graphic workstations

ANd workstation cards aren't for gaming...

 

[jonavin]

I always thought that the difference between GeForce and Quadro is that GeForce have certain feature disable. Maybe I am wrong....oh well.

 

[Ice Czar]

Nvidia already have one available, it's call NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4400 PCI-Express Card that have 512MB of DDR-3. Ofcourse you are looking at $1000+ card since these are made for graphic workstations

not to mention that the Wildcat III 6210 has had 416MB of RAM since March 2002
256MB of texture RAM, 128MB of Frame buffer RAM and 32MB of DirectBurst RAM

Until the most recent Quadro FX4400 there have been none with GDDR3. .

while the Wildcat Realizm 800 has 640MB currently (PCI-E) August 2004 just like the FX 4400
(dual VPU 700 GFLOPS of floating-point graphics processing)

"Wildcat Realizm 800 has a 512-bit bus which links to 512 MB’s of extremely fast GDDR3 graphics memory. In addition, the Wildcat Realizm 800 also integrates 128 MB of onboard DirectBurst memory to cache data to boost geometry-intensive applications creating a total of 640 MB of onboard memory"

$2,799

I dont see anything saying this is the "Gaming" Videocard Forum

 

[yevaud]

Extreme Workstation cards notwithstanding, I re-iterate my previous comment. There will be no 512mb GAMING cards released this year that use GDDR3. If one is released, I will eat my own shorts and post pics here.

 

[Outcompute_123]

It wouldn't surprise me if Ice is working on building himself a wildcat realizm. From scratch no less :

 

[Ice Czar]

will be quite awhile before I jump to the next platform (PCI-E)
(after its settled down and dropped in price)
the Quadro FX3000 will do just fine till then

 

[Nazo]

God, if you people have THAT much money to throw away on stuff that will increase your FPS by a few points in Doom 3, how about donating some of it to those of us who are basically screwed. *sigh*

Anyway, I must point out that, like people are saying, it WILL be a while before 512MB is TRULY (and I emphasis that part again) used. Even with the games capable of utilizing this, they will still work just fine with less with a minimal difference for a long time due to the fact that people won't be upgrading to that for quite a while yet in many cases. (Most of us still have 128MB cards in fact, and Doom 3 looks fine on them.) With the PCI-E race going on, it IS expected that a lot more people will have PCI-E in the not so far future however (especially thanks to nVidia's HSI bridge trick,) and, theoretically, this would reduce the bad effects of loading lots of textures even more. The main thing that will hold people back is the fact that they would have to update their boards (this is excluding the fact that there's only a few boards out there right now capable of PCI-E, I'm talking about the very near future.) Still, eventually the MB has to get upgraded as using an old MB can limit you more than your CPU sometimes. (Think memory, FSB, etc, as well as extras that might -- or might not -- become more popular in the future like SATA.)

That said, I will point out that, in the near future, MANY games will be using the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 engines. In fact, there are two games being produced RIGHT NOW using the HL2 engine. So, what applies to the original games might not 100% apply to derivitives. Also, I'd imagine that Crytek's engine might see some more use with even more updated features (and it can already utilize ps 3.0 to some small extent.) I still don't see any of these making such a huge jump to truly make 512MB worth the extra cost though. Lol, maybe Unreal 3 or whatever will be what TRULY does that.

 

[Ice Czar]

God, if you people have THAT much money to throw away on stuff that will increase your FPS by a few points in Doom 3, how about donating some of it to those of us who are basically screwed. *sigh*.

LOL, sorry Im not a gamer (other than a few flash distractions)
its a 3D and image editing rig
dont even own a gaming controller

 

[Nazo]

Well, I didn't really mean you specifically. I assumed no one was crazy enough to buy a card that is > $2000 just for gaming. God I pray not anyway. You'd get far more out of upgrading the heck out of your system and getting a normal video card probably.

I actually meant even the people looking at the normal 512MB cards. They are still unreasonably expensive.

 

[xSyzygy666x]

i wanna see a review of doom3 done on the matrox parahelia and the quadros and the like....just for the hell of it

 

[Outcompute_123]

God, what is that flash wack-a-mole game. (Not the spyware heh)

 

[Nazo]

God, what is that flash wack-a-mole game. (Not the spyware heh)

Would you mind terribly explaining the significance to me? I'm afraid I rather missed it... Lol, I don't mean to be rude, but, my mouse was hovering over that report post button even. ^_^

EDIT: Ah, I see. A reference to Ice Czar's mention of flash addiction. Lol, I knew I was missing SOMETHING.


Anyway, I still say that if you have the cash to get a 512MB card just because, buy a 256 and give me some cash so I can get a decent card. Lol. Seriously though. I can fully easily understand why you people want to see great quality, high framerates, etc, but, the benefits are quite minimal right now. If you have the money to blow on stuff like that, just keep saving up for the very near future when PCI-E has become popular and the cards truly take advantage of that 16x speed (first gen might not -- I'm only guessing here, but, later they will almost for sure, and 16x transfer rates makes vram just a bit less important even.) I'll bet that the saving thing would pay off more in the long run. Especially since you can't even REALLY use it just yet anyway. By the time you can that other stuff will be out and your card will be just a little bit outdated (probably about like the 9800 Pro is now, which, I admit isn't much, but, it would surely be annoying at least.) Lol, you won't have Pixel Shader 3.5 or SLI or any of that neat stuff (ok, 3.5 doesn't exist, just making a point, heh. But, we probably truly won't ever see an AGP SLI since only AGP 3.0 has any tricks that could allow it and even then you'd likely run into a million conflicts and issues. I'm willing to bet that two cheaper cards SLIed together will beat the crap out of a slightly better card.)

As for the benchmarking, well, Parahelia I can see, but who on earth would bother with the Quadros. I can't imagine very many gamers even have them (especially since the actual GPU of the cards are always a bit behind the current gaming technology.) I can imagine Parahelia though. A lot of people had some serious fun playing around with those and I can see the advantages of using it in Doom 3 if it could actually handle the load.

 

[xSyzygy666x]

As for the benchmarking, well, Parahelia I can see, but who on earth would bother with the Quadros. I can't imagine very many gamers even have them (especially since the actual GPU of the cards are always a bit behind the current gaming technology.) I can imagine Parahelia though. A lot of people had some serious fun playing around with those and I can see the advantages of using it in Doom 3 if it could actually handle the load.

i just think itd be neat ......and you never know.......im guessing there are at least a couple people that do alot of CAD work and play video games on the same rig...itd be interesting to see...

 

[Nazo]

Bad. VERY bad. The didn't explicitely say it (or I missed it) but, I'm willing to bet they were using a single monitor display too.

http://tech-report.com/etc/2004q3/doom3-midlow/index.x?pg=1

Worthless. It defeats the whole purpose of a Parhelia. Though it was interesting just how few FPS actually dropped with resolution increases. Ah well, it really wasn't intended for gaming. Can you just imagine going into work at a place utilizing a 3 LCD setup on one of those things? Now, THAT is a purpose I can see this thing being put to use on. *drools onto keyboard and gets zapped*

 

[xSyzygy666x]

lol....damn it DOES get its ass kicked.....oh well...its still funny...and thank you for finding that....

 

[Killdozer]

Well, I hope they have some 'full fledged' 512Mb cards out soon because games now need that stuff. What I don't want to see is some x600 with 512mb ram with crippled pipes and running at 64bit or something.

 

[Nazo]

But they DON'T "now need that stuff." MAYBE in a year or two one could be defined as needing it because it truly utilizes 512MB, but, even Doom 3 gets a very diminishing return on that, and it's practically the only thing that can even use it.

Anyway, it's in the rumor mill that ATI is actually finally coming out with a next generation chip using actual new technology instead of just the same old newer faster same old chips. Probably they have plans to make a 512MB model of this (they'll probably have a cheaper 256MB model as well I bet.)

 

[Killdozer]

I dunno, considering how long 128mb has been around and not even being used for the longest time, then 256mb cards come out and that extra ram was utilized pretty quickly. Same thing could happen to 512 cards when they're released.