Cheaper 1 GB Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 Coming Soon

[blibba]

I defiantly think over 1GB is a must for 2560x1600 and above (multi monitor setups) although i must admit I was surprised by how well a pair of 1GB cards did at 5040x1050 but with the right settings it was easy to cause them to run short on memory in certain games.

How defiant of you.

Remember that resolutions above 1080p are still a niche market, and that people who can afford that kind of screen space typically don't mind paying for a top notch graphics solution.

...also when some people say (not even specifically targeted at this thread) that 2gb is uneccesary, they may have a narrow point of view on it.. sure ALL of the 2gb isnt needed, but you only need a game to want 1.1gb to be snaffu'd with a 1gb card.

This is exactly my point. Thing is though, the density required to make 2GB cards is very expensive. Remember that your 260 is a DDR3 card, so this isn't such an obstacle. The sweetspot for very high end GPUs is definitley around 1.5GB atm, imo. That said, I've yet to encounter issues on my card with only 512MB of memory - but then I tend to play at 1440x900 with settings that my pentium dual core can cope with

 

[bear jesus]

How defiant of you.

hahaha dam auto correction, i never even noticed i clicked the wrong word.

 

[DanTheMan]

Having less memory chips should help the cooling a little more for even a quieter system overall. This may even help in the better overclocking scheme of things. Even if $30 to $40 less it would be a good bargin for most folks that don't require the latest and greatest. If in crossfire the roughly $60 to $80 dollars saved between the two cards allows you to upgrade you CPU - so mission accomplished.

 

[FilipM]

For the first time ever, I am getting "out of texture memory" errors when playing World of Tanks @ 1920 x 1200 on highest settings.... so next year is actually here

I get the same here haha


Back on subject, if these cards are within 5% of the 2GB models, and if price is more than right, AMD might have a winner here

 

[El_Mayo]

I like the sound of this!

 

[Deleted member 67555]

I love REAL competition

 

[TheMailMan78]

Price or GTFO!

Anyway for a single card solution on a single monitor this makes much more sense. Price is where its at.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

all i know is 2gb of ram is extremely welcome for anyone that dosent think its worth it well when Open CL / Direct compute gets more widespread in its use your gonna be happy with the extra ram i already know right now that Metro 2033 with its Direct compute Blur filter uses a shit ton of vram and as more of these features are added you can expect vram usage to go up as well.

Hell from what ive seen

Far Cry 2 can use 1.1-1.2gb of vram
Metro 2033 can use with DX11 options on 1.5gb + of vram
Crysis back in 2006 was able to hit 800-900mb of vram and then some with AA etc

games are starting to use more ram and as new stuff gets tacked on its only going to go up up up.

These new 1gb 6950s and 6970s will be fine for 1680x1050 = 1920x1080 but there still gonna get slapped on the vram front at 1920x1080 or higher.

 

[TheMailMan78]

all i know is 2gb of ram is extremely welcome for anyone that dosent think its worth it well when Open CL / Direct compute gets more widespread in its use your gonna be happy with the extra ram i already know right now that Metro 2033 with its Direct compute Blur filter uses a shit ton of vram and as more of these features are added you can expect vram usage to go up as well.

W1zz's bench of the 6950/70 didn't refect that in Metro.

 

[wolf]

I'm sure if hit the ram limitation on my 1gb GTX460 in a few games already, I'll post back here with the useage for some games after some testing.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

9/10 ITS because w1zzard dosent use Depth of Field the DX11 direct compute blur shader which my 5800 1gigs would struggle to get 15fps with but a single 6970 gets 25-30 dual 5850s managed 25-30 dual 6970s pull in at 55+

Depth of field has a large ram footprint but is also shader intesive the new 4vliw offers better performance then VLI5 but even then the extra ram makes a rather large difference at least in my time playing the game

granted in some games im not getting proper gpu usage but im hitting a ram limit back on 5800s its rather interesting to see as some games even when ram limited it has little effect in others it causes massive slow downs

below is the memory usage on 2x Nvidia gpus in Metro 2033

 

[Gzero]

I thought it was well known that the way AMD and Nvidia handle VRAM storage completely differently?

1.5gb usage on Nvidia card /= AMD card.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

uh how storage is handled may be different but texture sizes dont change, i do 3d work a 1024x1024 texture is around 520KB in size and that increases depending on the amount of info stored. Thus for instance a single character might have 3-4 1024x1024 maps that also include 3-4 spec and normal maps so a single character in terms of just textures is around 5-6mb not counting the shader itself that has to be loaded as well. Then add the Geometry even compressed your looking at 700KB to 2mb per character loaded then Tessellation more Geometry = more memory usage. There is also the fact that textures might be 2048x2048 aka 800KB to 1mb per file this increases stress on the vram as it grows nearly exponentially with texture size. There is also Alpha Maps and Subsurface scattering maps in Metro 2033 so a character in that game probably comes in around 4 Color maps 4 normal maps 4 spec maps 1 sub subsurface scattering map 1 Alpha map the list goes on. This can apply to nearly any object.

Dosent matter how they dictact storage there still gonna end up with exact the same memory usage. because the card itself cant dictate what file type the games art files are using thus dosent matter.

a single character mesh + textures + lighting effects will use around 10-15mb by themselves

So the 2 characters on your screen there are around 30mb your character is do to LOD distance around 10mbs so just for the 2x NPCS and your character your hitting 40-50mbs of vram. Now that all add up when you look at the entire picture, objects, textures, light sources, AA via a post process filter, Direct Computed Blur filter that has to store info per frame along with particle effects you hit the ram limit pretty quickly. Not to mention that while LODs help and so do mipmaps that info again still has to be stored into vram thus no matter what nvidia does or ATi it wont effect the vram usage its still gonna be 1500mb on Nvidia or ATi no matter how you slice it. And yes Screen resolutions also factors into this heavily as well. It should also be mentioned shadow maps eat vram for breakfast lunch dinner and midnight snack.

edit for punctuation do to grammer nazi's

 

[inferKNOX]

I think 2GB of memory is a very relevant feature in the cards for the sake of Eyefinity. I don't see the 1GB cards suffering all that much in single screen setups though. Perhaps a little kink here and there, but nothing that a person after the price for these cards will really complain about.

 

[Gzero]

uh how storage is handled may be different but texture sizes dont change, i do 3d work a 1024x1024 texture is around 520KB in size and that increases depending on the amount of info stored. Thus for instance a single character might have 3-4 1024x1024 maps that also include 3-4 spec and normal maps so a single character in terms of just textures is around 5-6mb not counting the shader itself that has to be loaded as well. Then add the Geometry even compressed your looking at 700KB to 2mb per character loaded then Tessellation more Geometry = more memory usage. There is also the fact that textures might be 2048x2048 aka 800KB to 1mb per file this increases stress on the vram as it grows nearly exponentially with texture size. There is also Alpha Maps and Subsurface scattering maps in Metro 2033 so a character in that game probably comes in around 4 Color maps 4 normal maps 4 spec maps 1 sub subsurface scattering map 1 Alpha map the list goes on. This can apply to nearly any object.

Dosent matter how they dictact storage there still gonna end up with exact the same memory usage. because the card itself cant dictate what file type the games art files are using thus dosent matter.

a single character mesh + textures + lighting effects will use around 10-15mb by themselves

So the 2 characters on your screen there are around 30mb your character is do to LOD distance around 10mbs so just for the 2x NPCS and your character your hitting 40-50mbs of vram. Now that all add up when you look at the entire picture, objects, textures, light sources, AA via a post process filter, Direct Computed Blur filter that has to store info per frame along with particle effects you hit the ram limit pretty quickly. Not to mention that while LODs help and so do mipmaps that info again still has to be stored into vram thus no matter what nvidia does or ATi it wont effect the vram usage its still gonna be 1500mb on Nvidia or ATi no matter how you slice it. And yes Screen resolutions also factors into this heavily as well. It should also be mentioned shadow maps eat vram for breakfast lunch dinner and midnight snack.

edit for punctuation do to grammer nazi's

Thanks for trying to explain it, but you missed something. Texture compression. :>

Both companies optimise with their own libraries, and push them on Game Dev's to use them as you know.

That's how the cookie crumbles.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

and i just mentioned that Direct Draw is the default file type inside the actual damn game folders i can look at compression of a texture and see what size it is average file size with compression on a 1024x1024 texture is about 520KB it dosent magically change.

That is of course unless every single 3d app and file format system devised in the game industry is lying because in general the only way to drop vram usage is to lower texture quality and render settings in general. besides there compressions aka and optimizations are basically messing with texture FILTERING not texture compression. examples Civilization 5 uses direct compute compression on the leaders textures nvidia dosent do anything to that nor ATi there gpus just have to do the grunt of decompressing the already compressed archives, thus again moot point it dosent change memory footprint inside the gpus enough to mean squat seriously 5-10KB they might be able to eek out isnt gonna be enough to make 500mb of texture info and data shrink to so a gpu with 1gb of ram can handle the same information workload as one with 1.5gb or more. because to compress that data further would create artifacts artifacts that would cause inferior texture quality. a good example of this is Onlive and there method for compression it greatly impairs image quality for bandwidth so as to maintain a fluid image same applies basically.

so in the end there usually only 1 compression method applied and its done as a way to either

A) keep modders out
B) allow the texture files to work with said game engine
C) compressed to fit in a group container ala something similar to BSA archives etc

 

[Gzero]

I'll just leave this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture

Not saying your wrong or anything, just there are plenty of methods that sometimes mean that vram usage is not static even for textures across both vendors.

 

[Gzero]

Plus (older) AA is done across the CPU and GPU, so I wouldn't think that would be affecting the vram usage. :>

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

vram via controll panel greatly impacts vram usage in some cases 8xAA around 1920x1200 can have an impact as high as 200mb alone.

and you realize only game that uses Mega Texture tech is Enemy Territory Quake wars right and its not done on the GPU lvl its simple a massive texture that takes the place of tiling a smaller texture gpus dont mean squat in terms of compressing that. So sure while Mega Texture may in a sense break the vram limit since its streaming the info it does change that aspect but still it must follow the same general guidelines aka it has to work at set ram limits thus quality filtering mipmaps = smaller texture size etc all allow it to fit thats true but im not talking lowering settings or getting something to fit. I am simply stating that you cant magicall shrink something smaller then normal compression allows without a trade off in quality that is extremely noticeable in this regard most games today usage around 500-700mbs of vram 8xAA can have a toll around 100-200mb so you end up at 600-900mb of vram usage. Add in Direct Compute which also needs ram to store data post processing effects etc its not hard to break the limit really.

Hell TeamFortress 2 at 8xAA 1920x1200 on the aging source engine can top out around 900mb of vram if you have extra ram games will take advantage of it when pushing settings it might not always mean a frame rate increase but i can generally eliminate frame drops that tend to come from hitting a vram wall.

below is Oblvion and its Vram usage with AA and resolution taken into account thats a 5 year old title now.

Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl dosent actually use AA as its a deferred rendering engine AA is a basically a blur filter.

ether way those graphs are from games released prior to 2007 thus its been 4 years since the article these came from and they dont show usage at 1920x1200 which ups the vram usage again. so even in 2007 we were close to the 1gb barrier as of today we are already near the 1.5gb barrier and climbing.

again none of these take into account the fact that shadow map sizes have gone from in oblivions case of 256x256 up to 4096x4096 in some games with many using 1024 or 2048 map sizes in games. Dynamic lighting is also a huge vram eater and is getting used in more and more games

you will notice that by using dynamic lighting vs static vram usage nearly doubles in Stalker. That holds true today many games running say Unreal Engine 3 still use static lighting. We are at the transition phase right now AMD / Nvidia have been adding more and more ram to high end gpus for this reason. Metro 2033 in the old way aka DX10 no special features runs easy on a system dosent use much ram either but when pushing its DX11 features vram usage balloons and the same will be said of other titles that utilize new features.

 

[Isenstaedt]

^ Interesting graphs.

Hope this turns to be true, not like the "5730".

 

[sliderider]

I think 2GB of memory is a very relevant feature in the cards for the sake of Eyefinity. I don't see the 1GB cards suffering all that much in single screen setups though. Perhaps a little kink here and there, but nothing that a person after the price for these cards will really complain about.

Why spend more for a card capable of Eyefinity 6 if you won't be able to use it due to lack of memory? Eyefinity 6 becomes a nearly useless feature without the additional 1gb. If you're going to be stuck dropping down to Eyefinity 3, then save yourself some money and get a 6870. The only real advantages I see these cards having over a 6870 is in situations requiring more shaders than the 6870 carries and the ability to run more than 2 cards in Crossfire, assuming they don't remove that feature to bring the price down even more.

 

[Tatty_Two]

Why spend more for a card capable of Eyefinity 6 if you won't be able to use it due to lack of memory? Eyefinity 6 becomes a nearly useless feature without the additional 1gb. If you're going to be stuck dropping down to Eyefinity 3, then save yourself some money and get a 6870. The only real advantages I see these cards having over a 6870 is in situations requiring more shaders than the 6870 carries and the ability to run more than 2 cards in Crossfire, assuming they don't remove that feature to bring the price down even more.

For the one in 50,000 that will use Eyefinity 6, I am sure they will be able to afford the 2GB models, board partners make their profit by providing products for the majority..... not the minority, ultimatly the 1GB 6950 will fill a niche above the 6870 so will appeal to some.