Why cant video 3d cards have heaps of memory?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gabriel Knight
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Gabriel Knight

Why is it your average new video card of today dosnt have any more than 2-3
gig of memory on them? They have SSD drives now and flash drives with upto
32 gig so why cant new video cards have about 40 to 60 or more memory on
board? Is it to expensive to make or buy or other?

Thanks
GK
 
Gabriel said:
Why is it your average new video card of today dosnt have any more than 2-3
gig of memory on them? They have SSD drives now and flash drives with upto
32 gig so why cant new video cards have about 40 to 60 or more memory on
board? Is it to expensive to make or buy or other?
Click to expand...

Oh, so because it has "memory" in its description then it must all
perform the same function and have the same performance. Does all
"software" have the same function set and the same cost? Do all "cars"
have the same wheelbase, features, color, and cost?

You really thought that video random access memory (VRAM) or synchronous
dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) was the same price as flash RAM?
And why would you want your video to run with the slowest of the three?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_ram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-access_memory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random_access_memory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

Would you want to pay the super expensive cost for a VRAM-based USB
drive and have to leave your computer on all the time to retain the data
on that drive? Would you want to get the super cheap flash RAM but have
your video crawl along despite that you don't need to save anything in
that "video" flash memory when the computer is powered off?

Say you were willing to suffer with the slow flash memory on a video
card. 2D would be really slow so forget about 3D rendering and motion.
Flash ram degenerates over time due to junction oxide stress hence the
need for "wear levelling" and the extra flash ram (reserve memory) used
to mask out the bad spots (which increase with use). The masking adds
more delay so the device gets progressively slower. The more that goes
bad, the more that needs to be masked out, the more delay to address the
memory to get past the bad spots. Eventually it catastrophically fails
because there is no more reserve memory available for masking. Did you
really want your video card to suddenly die after a few years or months
from extremely much higher use than your flash drive would ever
encounter?

You obviously haven't bothered to look at prices or performance for the
different types of storage.

16GB GDDR5
Speed: Very fast
Cost: "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" winner range
Permanency: Doesn't generate (if you keep it cool)

16GB DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) CAS-9 (4x4GB)
$100 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820144488)
Speed: Fast
Cost: Expensive
Permanancy: Doesn't degenerate

16GB SSD NAND flash SATA2
$55 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139428)
Speed: Slow (rated 75MBps write, 230MBps read)
Moderate cost
Permanency: Degenerates due to oxide wear, slows with added masking

40GB 7200RPM 2MB cache SATA2 (smallest new drive at newegg)
$25 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145527)
Cost: Cheap
Permanency: Slightly degenerative (excluding abuse)

You're confusing the faster speed of an SSD drive against the mechanical
hard disk drive and you think that's just as fast when compared against
video/dynamic RAM? What memory wouldn't be faster than a mechanical
drive? Being faster than a mechanical drive is hardly relevant
regarding the performance of system or video memory. The SSD above
can't even surpass the need for SATA2 (3Gbps or 375GBps).

Didn't you even do the math to figure out what the 1GB video card would
cost once you added another 16 GB to it (since there are no 15GB
modules)? You really want to pay another $100 for that same video card?
And just what applications do you have that would store that amount into
the video RAM? Do you actually have anything that'll utilize all of the
1GB that's there now? Of the two example 1GB PCIe2.1-16X 256-bit video
cards below, would you spend another $100 to get another 16GB on it
(well, it'll be a hell of a lot more than just $100 since these use
GDDR5 instead of just DDR3) or get the better video card?

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD6790 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support
$140 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102931)
800 Stream Processing Units

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD6950 1GB HDCP Ready CrossFireX
$240 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102949)
1408 Stream Processing Units

Okay, lets say you do want to spend the money, and LOTS of it, on
getting a video card with a more memory. Let's just go to 4GB for now
(since I can find those listed at newegg):

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD6990 4GB 256-bit GDDR5 HDCP Ready CrossFireX
$700 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102927)
3072 (1536 x 2) Stream Processing Units

Now quadruple that to $2800 for a 16GB video card. Oh, you're really
going to spend that much and put it in a consumer-grand computer. Sure
you are, uh huh. So you want a $2800 video with 16GB the vast majority
of which is never accessed just because you can buy a $55 16GB SSD drive
that uses the slowest and degenerative memory.
 
Like you and I said it would cost to much but when or if in the future costs
go down there might be video cards with excess of 16gig... Might the
military have something like this already? - Or even the "blue Gene" could
be using some 16gig video cards though I dought it - the specs are out there
somewhere I just thought Ide mention the blue gene because it would make for
one worlds greatest gaming machine!! To be more serious you pointed out
there are many different types of ram though without looking at costs to buy
one it Is possable but not going to happen until manufacturers can make
expensive ram cheaply. Whats the likelihood of that happening in the next 10
years?

And thanks for all the info
 
Like you and I said it would cost to much but when or if in the future costs
go down there might be video cards with excess of 16gig... Might the
military have something like this already? - Or even the "blue Gene" could
be using some 16gig video cards though I dought it - the specs are out there
somewhere I just thought Ide mention the blue gene because it would make for
one worlds greatest gaming machine!! To be more serious you pointed out
there are many different types of ram though without looking at costs to buy
one it Is possable but not going to happen until manufacturers can make
expensive ram cheaply. Whats the likelihood of that happening in the next 10
years?

And thanks for all the info
Click to expand...
If they made expensive ram cheaply, then it would no longer be expensive
ram. That sounds recursive to me!
 
Gabriel said:
Like you and I said it would cost to much but when or if in the future costs
go down there might be video cards with excess of 16gig... Might the
military have something like this already? - Or even the "blue Gene" could
be using some 16gig video cards though I dought it - the specs are out there
somewhere I just thought Ide mention the blue gene because it would make for
one worlds greatest gaming machine!! To be more serious you pointed out
there are many different types of ram though without looking at costs to buy
one it Is possable but not going to happen until manufacturers can make
expensive ram cheaply. Whats the likelihood of that happening in the next 10
years?

And thanks for all the info
Click to expand...

If you look at the M2090 entry here, they have 6GB of memory
connected to a single GPU. That's about the largest example I
can think of. Those are GPUs which aren't intended for gaming -
they run as "computers" instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(GPU)

The largest actual gamer video card, is the Asus MARS, at 4GB of video RAM.
But since that was a dual GPU card, that is likely 2GB per GPU,
which isn't nearly as dense as the M2090 example.

If they had to support much larger numbers of memory chips, the
speed the memory bus runs at, would have to drop. And as far
as I know, 512 bits is the max width of memory interface they've
used to date. You can't bump that number up too much, like to 1024,
because then it becomes difficult to make a reliable package to
hold the GPU chip. The record on chip pin count is around
6000 connections, but the technology isn't suited to home computers.

So the "dimensions" of the memory are fixed by practical limits.
Limited chips per bus, limited bus pins per package, limited
memory bits within each chip. In fact, the last one, is the one
most likely to improve with time (Moore's law). You'll have to
admit, video card memory has improved a lot from those old
video cards with 4MB strapped to them. (I think I might have an old
Matrox like that around here somewhere.)

Paul
 
To be more serious you pointed out
there are many different types of ram though without looking at costs to buy
one it Is possable but not going to happen until manufacturers can make
expensive ram cheaply. Whats the likelihood of that happening in the next 10
years?
Click to expand...


Why should they, manufacturers, if there's no incentive. When you
watch advertisements for how the manufacturer sees such video cards,
it's pictures of boys who resemble men. Not what you think of a
business man, but quasi-men with very soft beards they don't shave.
The boyish men depicted can scrape together $500 for a video card, for
sure, to play the games they're selling, but that's not the same as
compounding $75-175K yearly salary for an IT specialist paid by
someone worth enough money to follow through IT's advice and outfit a
medium to small business office with 5000 computers. What happens is
when company XYZ sees IT contact ZYX for that 5000-unit contract, they
take special notice. When X number of ITs emerge into the market,
moreover, the industries begin gearing towards them, cutting one
another for profits by tasking their design engineers for more
efficient ways which, over time, will compound into what you're asking
for. A bigger and better game to trickle down for peanuts. A direct
and not an offset price of overall advancements marketing over time
takes by watching what people are doing through means and
encouragements, by product concept and promotion. Now consider how
that is different from Microsoft, who while watching people for
tendencies to purchase computers, decided which hardware manufacturers
they would either write software drivers, or include in computer
assembly contracts endorsed for their operating system. Think back
recently to when national courts got around to judging Microsoft, and
tell me how many years, specifically, did the judgment go against
Microsoft for having set computer advancements back across a wider
industry and its faculty for research?
 
Gabriel said:
Like you and I said it would cost to much
Click to expand...

Like I said. Like you asked.
Might the military have something like this already?
Click to expand...

The military calls them "simulators". We use them for entertainment.
They use them for training.
"blue Gene" could be using some 16gig video cards though I dought it
- the specs are out there somewhere I just thought Ide mention the
blue gene because it would make for one worlds greatest gaming
machine!!
Click to expand...

Massive processing parallelism, large high-speed instruction caching,
and deep pipelining aren't new. They don't lend themselves to monster a
graphic interface since it's just one set of eyes watching the monitor
(whether it be one pair or multiple pairs watching the same screen).
Remember you're talking about user I/O. How "super" can you make a
keyboard? There's a limiting factor for its use: the human. Making
decisions is not a graphics issue. The massive processing power lets
you generate the data for the video output but the video output isn't a
choke point anymore.

Instead you have AMD acquiring ATI to eliminate the differentiation
between CPU and GPU by merging them into an APU (e.g., Fusion, Bobcat,
Bulldozer). In the past, getting onboard video meant getting a crappy
video controller and having to steal the slower system RAM to use as the
video buffer. That'll pass and eventually you'll have an APU and slice
off a portion of then then-faster system RAM for the video buffer. Then
you can lop off as much of the system RAM as you want depending on how
much you installed and how much you are willing to pay excepting for
in-built limitations in video addressing in the APU (i.e., how big a
buffer it can address).
Whats the likelihood of that happening in the next 10 years?
Click to expand...

I gave up trying to predict what happens beyond 3 years in the computing
industry.
 
Gabriel Knight said:
Why is it your average new video card of today dosnt have any
more than 2-3 gig of memory on them? They have SSD drives now
and flash drives with upto 32 gig so why cant new video cards
have about 40 to 60 or more memory on board? Is it to expensive
to make or buy or other?
Click to expand...

Without looking at the other replies... Probably because it's a
different kind of memory. My motherboard has only 4 GB of system
memory. A video card with 2 to 3 GB of RAM would look lopsided.

Also, there's the question of necessity, or not. Everybody wants
an SSD drive nowadays. Few people could use a video card with 2 to
3 GB of RAM.
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