I was wondering how long it would take for 512MB to work it's way into the main stream, well it's not quite ready yet but these two cards, with the edition of the 6800 Ultra Insanely Expensive Edition and a few workstation models are the only ones out with this much mem so far (though 3dLabs has a 640Mb card floating around I belive but screw it if your a gamer). Anyway this really surprised me: Crazy Then there's the X800XL which I can't say really shocks me as I've heard it was comming but damn these are a good deal for what you get, if you really think you need this much memory then get the X800XL, good deal:good: The 6200 is more of a gimick though, don't bother unless you only have that much to spend, in it's league it's probably one of the best.
its not like that willhub, the RAMDACs are sort of more dedicated to the GPU work also doom3 is supposed to look evenn better on ULTRA mode with 512mb cards
You mean VRAM. VRAM is much more suited to graphics operations than normal RAM. I'd say that 512mb won't take long to be accepted as the norm in a few months or year. The moves from 64mb to 256 has been pretty transparent, and would be the same with 512. Especially with the introductions of the Unreal 3 engine and other new games.
Though someone with 256Mb's or vram can run Doom 3 in ultra mode if they have at least a gig of DDR ram, even though Ultra mode requires about 512Mbs or ram on most maps anyway, it's borrowed from your system memory like intel's crappy integrated gfx.
i think a 256mb card like x800xt could run doom 3 in ultra settings becouse no word of a lie, when i tried it with my 9600 card, it got onto a level, but it was like playing at about 7-10fps, and how many times better is an x800xt better than a 9600 lol?
my dads 9600 AIW can run farcry on 1024x768 on medium AA and 2xAF on trilinear, with water quality on ultra, and everything else on very high with a few frames to spare 32-35
shared memory is good for integrated, but it has to go throughthe northbridge (unless its on CPUs with integrated memory controller) and that will cause lots of latencies and bandwidth issues. even a mx440 card is better than most integrated ones.
but still, the highest game I was able to play on my old computer with integrated was Warcraft 3 and it lagged a bit from time to time
Wow, talk about crappy, the game only requires 8Mb's or vram, must be some old integrated gfx then ATI cards are better at Pixel shader 2, maybe that explains some of those gains, very impressive. That's a good point Will, I'm not basing my comment off of personal experience, just what I heard, I always read "Ultra mode requires 512Mb's or vram...", I guess that's not always the case.
I read an article in, I believe it was CPU, yes CPU, that reviewed the x800xl 512 MB version. It said that the extra money wasn't worth it. The thing is that the GPU is not good enough to need 512 MB. The article said it was basically just ATI getting the title of first mainstream video card with 512 MB of memory.
