Why Don't They Increase Memory on Video Cards to 1 MB and Beyond

  • Thread starter Thread starter CHANGE USERNAME TO westes
  • Start date Start date
As gaming becomes more
immersive I would expect to see two to four monitors become very common
place.
Click to expand...

Why? Having more than one monitor is impracticable for most people. I
doubt more than one monitor will ever be common place.
 
CHANGE said:
You see a 7 to 15% performance improvement between 128 MB and 256 MB
if you are doing 6x FSAA, at least according to Tom's Hardware.
Click to expand...

The major flaw in that statement is that you are trusting what Tom's
Hardware says. They've been proven to lie through their teeth in their
reviews in the past. There is an enormous group of people worldwide that
would never trust a word that comes out of the pages of THG... myself
included.

Anyway, just increasing memory SIZE won't increase speed. The purpose of
larger video card memory is to fit larger textures into a single frame of a
scene. There is a fine balance between GPU clock speed, memory speed, and
memory size that gives a video card it's performance. Any shortcoming in
any one of these will make a card perform poorly. Just bumping the _amount_
of RAM won't do jack if the GPU can't draw the triangles fast enough to
clear the buffer for the next frame of animation. Think of it this way:
You have a Pentium 266 Celeron, with 64 MB of RAM (PC133 at that!), but you
want to do some distributed computing for SETI@home, Folding@home or
whatever... ok so you just add more RAM, say, 8GB (still PC133, of course,
for system compatibility), and you'll be cranking work units out by the
hundreds DAILY! oh wait, no you won't, because you still have a 266 MHz.
CPU, and your system bus is still only 133 MHz.
 
Probably because they increased memory to 1 MB, back in 1991, on the
first VLB local Bus cards; previously many cards had only 256K or 512K
of video RAM

*groans*
:)
j/k.....(read the subject)
 
Why don't they allow for the memory to be upgradeable like in the good old
days? It comes with default of 32MB of RAM and then everyone buys a 1GB
chip that they can just keep installing on their new upgraded video card
(until they come up with a new type of RAM)
Click to expand...

Probably for performance and cost reasons. Video card memory isn't a
dumb slow frame buffer anymore.

What would you expand the card with? Desktop DDR memory is slow by
video card standards. I suppose ATI could come up with a proprietary
memory upgrade package for their cards, but these would no doubt be
expensive. Also, it would add to the cost and complexity of the video
card to make a flexible design that could accept more memory*, not to
mention the added cost and potential reliability and support problems of
the sockets.

And by the time you run out of video memory, you'll probably want a
faster GPU anyway. Even when video cards had expandable memory, it was
usually a better deal for your money to get a new video card anyway.


*Except for, say, 64-bit cards that can be upgraded to 128-bit by adding
another memory bank. Still, you could only double your memory...
 
You see a 7 to 15% performance improvement between 128 MB and 256 MB
Anyway, just increasing memory SIZE won't increase speed.
Just bumping the _amount_ of RAM won't do jack if the GPU can't draw the
triangles fast enough to clear the buffer for the next frame
Click to expand...

That's true, but when you're doing 6x FSAA, you're probably bound by
memory bandwidth, not triangle throughput.

Additional video card RAM can speed things up by reducing the amount of
data that has to travel over the AGP bus.
 
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