> > Still slightly mistaken, I'm afraid. Re-read that: it requires a 512 > MB Video card before it is set /automatically/. I can definitely run > at Ultra Quality, albeit unplayably choppy. I've seen a very high-end > system run it with only 256 MB Video. It was quite playable, but I'd > still set it down to High Quality for the busier areas. >
Expect games to go where visual simulations have gone - regularly loading 1 GB or more textures per frame, which is a bit small for some things. And, there will be more mainstream cards with 512 MB onboard by the end of this year. In some cases, there are places where loading 1 TB of texture memory is being done on a daily basis. Thus games like successors to Ut2004 and Doom3 will put some serious strain on systems. Loading textures will require dedicated disk channels that can sustain more than 40 MB/s. And the rest of the system will need it's sustainable bandwidth improved. Dual-SLI 16 lane PCI-express on a 2 cpu system with 1 GB dual channel main memory (minimum) and 2 Gfx cards, each with 512 MB of onboard memory. A lot of current systems won't come anywhere near this. And at the moment, only Hypertransport based systems seem to have the sustainable bandwidth to deal with moving this kind of data around. The rest have really nice peak bandwidth numbers, but poor sustainable bandwidth. Like supercomputers, many have some fairly awesome peak performance numbers, but only a few can actually get above 20% of peak performance when real work has to be done. Bob -- - -- [email protected] mailing list
