Diamond Announces 2GB Graphics Card
September 2nd, 2007 by James Hyde in Business, Hardware, PC, Technology
Upcoming PC games like Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 will certainly be pushing even the best hardware to the limit, especially graphics cards. Which is why one of the newly announced Diamond FX 2000 cards will come in handy. It will be packed with a massive 2 GB of video memory (DDR4, of course), while the GPU is the recently released ATI 2900 XT. Although the card is mainly intended for professionals (video editing etc.), I can imagine at least a few gamers, with considerably deep pockets, who’ll invest in one of these. The card will be out in a few weeks, price unknown.
September 2nd, 2007 at 1:02 pm
My first reaction: “holy shit!” What kind of game might make full use of that RAM?
September 2nd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
All games that can use the Higher widescreen resolutions and still give you decent fps. So if you are a power PC gamer and you like to run everything maxed out, with 8xFSAA, HDR, etc. displayed at 1680×1050, 1920×1200, and especially 2560×1600. So instead of getting say 44 fps you would get 55 fps or something like that (game dependent of course) since there is much more RAM to access and it the fastest VRAM around.
September 2nd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Yeah, lol. Plus, we’re getting bigger. Look, http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=165543
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Still, 512 MB is sufficient for the most commonly used resolutions, up to 1680×1050. 1 GB is enough for 1920×1080, even 2560×1600. To use 2 GB you have to play games at a ridiculously high resolution (2x 2560×1600 or something, which no game supports).
This is mainly targeted at professionals who need to render large images, CGI animation, 3D work and so on.
September 2nd, 2007 at 4:07 pm
guys this cool i can rember when i played mission impossible on commodore 64 16 mb cards things have improved alot these days
September 2nd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
also everyone rember we are still running several comps with great prizes
September 2nd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Awesome, I remember in 04/06 128/256 ram was the shit lol. Technology is growing so fast! Amazing, but the 9800 will max out all of these games. I’m hoping the price isnt deadly.
September 2nd, 2007 at 6:04 pm
A game like Crysis running under Vista and DirectX 10 is a good example of an application that will benefit from this for the most hardcore gamers as it will allow them to have higher frame rates while using the high resolutions. There is no doubt about that as all benchmark test between the 8800 GTS 320 and 640 show huge differences in fps once you hit these super high resolutions that hardcore PC gamers are playing at. The gain in the frames when using a 640 was substantial as was the difference in the 8800 GTS 640 and the GTX which has 768 MB of ram.
So yes the more video ram the better and the higher the fps the better, especially during intense firefights you will appreciate having some extra room for the rendering taking place. I’m sure the next Nvidia card will have at least a full 1GB of addressable RAM available.
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:16 pm
According to this page the gfx cards RAM is mapped into the PC’s 4GB address space.
http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
If so then having a 2GB video card would leave you with a maximum amount of RAM less than 2GB, no matter how much is actually installed.
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:15 am
Anuban: According to (unconfirmed) reports, the next Nvidia cards will have the same 384-bit memory bus, which means the amount of memory will stay at 768 MB, although some speculate that this will be GDD4;
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=42015
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Great info … looks like you definitely would need a system with a true 64 bit OS and good solid drivers and then you can load up on the memory. But yeah that is wild that basically there is this ceiling … but really no games break that yet. I think Crysis pushes it the most but by the time we really have quad core games and apps we’ll have to have 64 bit OSes to really make use of all that power so that we can have lots of ram. So maybe it is time to reconsider upgrading any time soon at least to Vista …
September 3rd, 2007 at 8:16 pm
What about Alan Wake? I was reading that game would run at its best potential with a quad-core.
Do you guys think that games are designed to run on current or soon to be out technology, or that technology is designed for the current or soon to be out games?
I think it could go either way, but with this card coming out, you can bet to see some amazing games in the next few years.
September 4th, 2007 at 5:47 am
I only know three games which will natively support quad core, Crysis, UT3 and Alan Wake. All other game will benefit more from a higher clock speed than additional cores.
I agree with Anuban that you need good 64 bit drivers, it’s the only reason I haven’t switched to Vista 64 yet. Memory is dirt cheap these days, so that’s not a problem, but drivers are.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:46 am
[...] deep pockets, who
September 5th, 2007 at 9:31 am
[...] with 2Gb?? I guess we’ll see. Diamond Announces 2GB Graphics Card
November 11th, 2007 at 11:01 am
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