256mb, is this a gaming advantage or not ?

[AD]

Does anyone know why something like 256mb of ram would help in propeling those pixels around the screen (for games), or is it something that would only benefit 3D *like in 3dmax or maya* ?

Ive only dabbled in 3D, i know that more ram mean's more texture's (and other things i think), but i am wondering if the only differences in the three parhelia cards will be just ram, do you think there will be added features as well as extra ram?

cheers..

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[impact]

Well, you definitely can stuff a lot of things into 256 MB of RAM, which means large complex scenes, huge textures etc... Should definitely benefit the apps/games that require large amounts of data.

[Joe DeFuria]

Probably wouldn't benefit games for the next year or two. If you are planning on buying a Parhelia, and plan on that being "your card" for 2-3 years, then I might go with a 256 MB version. Otherwise, 128 MB should be fine for gaming over the next 1-2 years.

[rugger]

Heh,

256Meg is the better part of my system memory

I wonder if we could memory map unused graphics memory and use it as main memory. . . . sort of reversed UMA

[Snake-Eyes]

Well, I expect 256MB might be useful for running ultra-high resolutions, all 3D quality features and details cranked up, with 4xFSAA (remember, it's supersampling in that mode). Since there are (and most likely will continue to be) some games that don't play nice when using 16xFAA mode, this seems like a good fallback (especially given the high memory bandwidth of the card).

[thop]

i say 128mb will be enought for a while. i expect the 256mb version to be _a lot_ more expensive than the 128mb since it will be targeted for proffesionals.
i myself will probably just get the 64mb.

now that i think of it ... 256MB on a graphic card

[Jazzz]

256MB will be very usefull when running on 3 monitors, i don't think many games make good use of 128MB so in that sense 256MB is an overkill but like Joe said people who buy the 256MB version probably won't need to upgrade for at least 2 yrs

[rugger]

Listen,

People who buy the 128meg version won't need to upgrade for 3 years. 64 meg is the standard today, with 128meg being cutting edge (I still run a 32meg card (GF1 DDR) and it still wonderfully well in modern games (1024x768, 32-bit, high detail))

People who buy the 256meg version, well, they probably know why or simply have too much money

[Wombat]

256MB wouldn't help that much with 3 monitors. A lot more of video RAM is used to hold textures and other rendering info than frame buffer, and since you're playing the same game almost all of that information is likely to be shared between the displays. It's still one render job, just split to three outputs.

[Snake-Eyes]

Has anyone done the math to see how much memory would be used with a 1600x1200 resolution, 32bit color, anisotropic filtering (er, the 64 super sample variety, I suppose), 4xFSAA, with a boatload of textures?

I'm curious, as the Ti4200 cards (64MBs) have troubles running AA at 1600x1200, mainly because of a lack of memory. (The real thing I'm wondering is whether 128MB is more than enough).

Not that it matters. If I had the money when Parhelia hits the streets, I'd most likely have the 128MB model anyway. (Cost/performance-feature ratio is probably just about right for what I normally am willing to spend on a video card).

[rugger]

well, some simple maths then

Following method posted at:

http://www.nvnews.net/articles/fsaa/page_1.shtml

We have

32-bit color, therefore 4 bytes per pixel
2 screen buffers (for double buffered output)
1 Z-buffer of 32-bits
2x2 FSAA, therefore each pixel is broken up into 4 subpixels.

Therefore the display space for 2 buffers requires:

1600x1200x4x4x2 = 61,440,000 bytes, or about 58 meg.

Now for the Z-buffer:

1600x1200x4x4 = 30,720,000 bytes, or about 29 meg

since 29+58 > 64, I can assume that you can't do FSAA on a 64meg card in that resolution.

But my methods may be wrong, please correct if they are.

As for the parhella, FSS does not require extra memory and is free basicly (if it works)

[TdB]

afaik the g400 32mb cards splitted the memory between the heads when in dualhead, leaving 16mb for each head, does the parhelia have the same limitation?
if it has then triplehead might not be THAT cool on a 64mb card.

[piaxVirus]

I would think that Triplehead wouldn't be available on the 64Mb model(s).

[Snake-Eyes]

Thanks for the math rugger. The reason I use 4x FSAA is because some titles (using stencil buffers) have problems with FAA right now. The fallback (which will probably work pretty well performance and image-wise) is FSAA (supersampled). With enough memory, higher resolutions (1600x1200 is now very possible with most of today's cards in today's games) would run with FSAA on.

[FormerEx-SalesSoup]

Originally posted by TDB
afaik the g400 32mb cards splitted the memory between the heads when in dualhead, leaving 16mb for each head, does the parhelia have the same limitation?
if it has then triplehead might not be THAT cool on a 64mb card.

The DualHead boards actually don't split 16MB per output, the memory is variable, so if you are running most of the apps on the primary display, more memory will be allocated to that display. If you run the board in SingleHead mode, all 32MB will be allocated to the one display.