The First 2GB video card

The First 2GB video card

Postby audioave10 on 25 Mar 2009 07:21

This looks interesting...

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=737

I guess GTA4 could use it.
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby EggChen on 25 Mar 2009 22:22

Yep, GTA 4 crashes on High textures, and I have a 1Gb card and 8Gb of RAM!!

Totally avoidable though, many, many textures are present multiple times. I was amazed at how many textures could have been shared, and lowered the memory footprint. An example is the clothes shops, every mesh for the clothes uses the exact same texture as the mesh for when the player wears the item, but rather than share the texture, it is present in the game files twice.

Some other textures are present up to 20 times!!

Another more absurd example is that the characters are rendered using different textures in cutscenes, but yep you guessed it, they are exactly the same as the in game textures!

Sometimes we need better coding, rather than throwing hardware at the problem... then again hardware costs us money, better coding costs them money....
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby audioave10 on 25 Mar 2009 23:23

Good Point...EggChen. By the way, how long would it take for you to fix
GTA4? =)) :)) :ymdevil:
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby EggChen on 25 Mar 2009 23:38

=)) =)) =)) =))

I still love it though... bit like Stalker.
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby NatVac on 25 Mar 2009 23:58

Yeah. We beg the game, "Beat me! Beat me!" And the game replies tersely, "No!" :P

Edit: I can't delete this non-Scottish OT, so I'll just say this:

  • With a game like GTA4 (the first they used for testing), you can't know where the problems are -- hardware or drivers or game; unless you know the innards like EggChen.*
  • Didja note that they used a 64-bit Windows for testing? I don't think you could easily map the video RAM into system RAM in current 32-bit OSes. And they mentioned two different sets of 3X2GB RAM -- is that 6 GB or 12 GB of system RAM in use? I didn't see a reference to how that RAM was deployed.
  • I like the quiet but effective fan.
__________
*I also dislike the bloat that makes the sellers more money. The excessive greed really is part of the reason for the world-wide economic situation. We need both short-term and long-term thinking, but they've already killed the golden-egg layer.

That was a cogent initial post, EggChen. It reminded me of Vista: Bigger, more expensive, requires hardware upgrade, but a positive return on investment lies solely with the manufacturer from my perspective.
Last edited by NatVac on 26 Mar 2009 11:31, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby audioave10 on 26 Mar 2009 03:55

Hey, this thread is about the First 2GB video card!
( and I'm the biggest off-topic freak in this group ) :-?
anyway...read the tests if your interested... :)
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby EggChen on 26 Mar 2009 22:05

audioave10 wrote:I'm the biggest off-topic freak in this group ) :-?


Don't sweat it buddy, we do off topic a lot in this forum, its far more relaxed than many others B-)
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby Grump642 on 27 Mar 2009 03:18

Sounds nice, but I want to see some benchies. I remember when they first came out with 1 Gig cards. The benchmarks showed very little improvement with the added vram. Will it make a difference in the 4870? Maybe in GTA4, but I doubt much else.
This is the card I want to see tested. http://www.dailytech.com/ATI+Radeon+4890+Details+Confirmed+Pictures+Taken/article14616.htm If 2 gig vram helps the 4870, it will work even better in the 4890.
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby audioave10 on 27 Mar 2009 04:50

In most cases the difference can't be seen without a fast CPU and gaming on a
high resolution monitor.
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Re: The First 2GB video card

Postby ket on 27 Mar 2009 18:33

GTA 4 is a piss poor game on PC, quite possibly the most messy coding job I've EVER seen.. and I spend a lot of time looking at game and driver code..

Anyway a 2GB graphics card is overkill, not because games can't utilise it, but because GPUs aren't powerful enough to make proper use of the additional texture memory.
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