Agreed. The average PC gamer, which includes myself, plays games on a single 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 display and simply will not need a card with more than 4 GB for the foreseeable future. By the time they do then the hardware would be obsolete anyway and too slow to run modern games. It is enthusiasts that want 6 GB for multi-monitor gaming but considering that they probably make up less than 1% of the user base then I have to question whether making the cards stupidly expensive is a sensible thing to do in this economy. I want a powerful high-end card at some point but I don't want one that costs me more for VRAM don't need. The GTX 680 may have had less VRAM than the AMD cards but in retrospect 2 GB was plenty for most people except for mere handful of games. Most games I play barely use more than half my cards VRAM!!!
P.S. It appears from the specs that AMD are sticking with 3 GB for their HD 8970 so 4 GB would still be 25% more on NVIDIA's top end card. I would be happy with 3 GB, which seems more likely given the switch from a 256 bit to 384 bit bus.
If you read the article and read the chinese source, you will see they have just receved 2 Tesla K20 cards ( no video output on the cards as seen on the screen ) .. And WCCF is pushing anything here . Damn some should stop write articles. Now reviewers got effectively the card, so we should know finally what it is at the end of the month ( 25-27th) ( if i take some comment of some reviewers about this wccf article : "" Some sites are really blowing this all out of proportion with false information..... "
At the rumored price point, who is Nvidia trying to draw with this card? Realistically, this thing will perform worse than a 690, so why not just buy on of those if you're willing to spend that much on a card? If this were the 780 and it was going to cost $500, there might be something to get excited about. I guess Fanboys with big wallets who have been having wet dreams about Big Kepler for the past year won't care about price.
With only a handful of games that even come close to using 2GB of Ram, I think I'll pass on this, but its a nice option for those who use multi-monitor setups.
being random what if some of the ram was used as a graphics cache to speed up the GPU ............... ingnore if being stupid it popped into my head the doctor did say i should ignore popping noises
Maybe 6gb will be the new 3gb in a year or so. Thinking it won't be long until 4k monitors will be the norm and some new games might start to push 4gb+.
Not sure why people are saying this is not true and just rumors, looks like it could quite easily be legit?
I still consider all of this rumor until the actual card ends up in the hands of a reviewer, or Nvidia announces it themselves. I just realllllly hope this is true. I'd sell these 7970's off in a heartbeat for ONE powerful card like this. Lol if this ends up true who is interested in 2 perfectly good 7970's flashed to Ghz BIOS, 100% working and stable at the clock speeds I have in my profile? I'll give a good deal.
Notice, the specs you saw are the same as the 7xxx series for a reason. They're the same cards. That's not the real 8970.
It's going to be a few years before 4K monitors enter the mainstream market....and at least another few years before they become "the norm"... Even now, 1920x1080 isn't "the norm" after being on the market for several years.
While you could argue how important 6GB of Vram is right now, 3GB is definitely not enough for a card that is likely to cost the biggest part of $1000, especially when it looks like the next gen consoles could have more than that. Textures over the next year are only going to get noticeably higher quality, proper AA now more than ever needs alot of vram, as does downsampling, and since for me AA is the most important visual feature and probably alot of others, buying one of these and having to turn settings like textures or AA down is going to be frustrating. While 4k screens might not be the norm for several years, a card like this is not normal either, and i cannot understand why anyone who has the money to buy this card would run it in such a low res like 19x10/12 when you have the money to get much better. My next GPU will be my last ever by the looks of things so if this ships with 6gb Vram then i will get it, if it's 3gb then i will probably skip it and see how the 8970 or GTX780 turns out.
I suppose it could work that way, but Nvidia would probably have to put code in their drivers to have it act in such a way.