Tuesday, December 11th 2007

GDDR4 HD 3850 Pictured

Expreview claims to have pictures of a version of the Radeon HD 3850 which uses GDDR4 memory instead of the GDDR3 found on current models. Dubbed the HD 3850 512MB Infinity, this card is built by Unika and uses Hynix 0.8ns memory - and you may notice it also has a non-reference PCB and quite an unusual cooler, which has been designed by Triplex. Apparently this card is clocked at 700MHz core and 2200MHz RAM, and according the Expreview the price will remain at around $200.
Source: Expreview
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29 Comments on GDDR4 HD 3850 Pictured

#26
btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator
Tatty_OneHigher GPU clock + therefore higher voltage to the core. TBH GDDR4 does not make a huge differfence in performance terms over GDDR3, if you think about it, the highest performing mid ranged cards at the moment all have GDDR3. Even the 512MB version of the 2900XT (GDDR3) beats the 1GB versions (GDDR4) in some benches!
But that's because:

1. The benchmarks run never really needed a >512 MB framebuffer.
2. The memory banks used with the 1GB DDR4 variants had very high latancies defeating its very purpose.
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#27
Tatty_Two
Gone Fishing
btarunrBut that's because:

1. The benchmarks run never really needed a >512 MB framebuffer.
2. The memory banks used with the 1GB DDR4 variants had very high latancies defeating its very purpose.
Yup....so why would anyone want to pay the extra for it? :D
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#28
btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator
Tatty_OneYup....so why would anyone want to pay the extra for it? :D
But AMD fixed this issue, with the DDR4 banks on the HD 3870 having the expected low latency. So I'm talking about AMD stepping up the memory size. For games like Crysis to run with all its textures un-compressed, even 768 MB that the GF GTX/Ultra packs isn't enough, it needs a rated 960 MB of texture memory. Sorta like Doom 3, when it released, 256 MB was the highest a card could offer, but the game had an "ultra mode" where all its textures are uncompressed and requires 400 MB of texture memory as displyed in the warning.
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#29
[I.R.A]_FBi
Tatty_OneYup....so why would anyone want to pay the extra for it? :D
because it sells for more on ebay?
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