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ATI new 512mb gaming card..


Swimmer

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After countless rumors circulating the Internet, ATI made things official with their announcement of the "world's first 512 MByte gaming card." ATI decided to debut this innovative technology at the Texas Gaming Festival LAN party in front of their most loyal of constituencies: hardcore gamers.

It was only a development card, with speeds the same as offered by the 256 MB X850XT: 520 MHz for the engine and 540 MHz for the memory. In an interview with the ATI product marketing engineer Jimmy Dinh, he said that doubling the memory was not an easy undertaking: you cannot "just slap more memory modules onto the board." Instead, the company needed to move from a single-rank design to a dual-rank memory architecture.

In a single rank design, all the modules are directly connected to the GPU. With a dual rank, the first rank of eight modules is connected to the GPU, while the second rank is connected to the first rank. The issue with a dual-rank design is that there are increased latencies as a result of piggy-backing the second rank off the first. Jimmy stated that ATI was able to "tweak the crap out of the memory controllers" so the second rank had the same latencies as the first rank. He continued to say that if they could not get it to work they would not have debuted the technology. Jimmy concluded by stating that there are plans to implement 512 MByte of GDDR3 onto future cards.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050305/ati_512mb_video_card-01.html

looks pretty sweet... might want to check it out if you are in the market for the latest and greatest..

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Yeah i have yet to see any benchmarks.. in fact the 128mb 9800 pros out proform the 256mb version.. so it could be interesting.. this happens because of the lag in the memory itself..  So..  The reason that you would need a card with 512mb would be for advanced pixel shading and if you wanted to have all of the goodies turned up... I guess ATI thinks that there is going to be a game launched that will use more than 256mb for the graphics.. other wise you create a bottle neck..

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Sure you could buy a $300+ video card but can you really tell the difference between 30 frames per sec or 170 fps?

X800 XT PE ran at 62 fps on "Battlefield Vietnam"  1600X1200 4x AA / 8x AF

X800 XT PE ran at 172 fps on "Battlefield Vietnam" 1024X768 no AA /no AF

Infomation from

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/vga_charts-11.html

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