8GB Sapphire Radeon R9 290X TOXIC

I agree with Hilbert, 8GB is total overkill ATM, this is nothing more than a marketing stunt IMHO.

 

Maby is not only marketing ;-) look ahead and see the 4k Gaming and CF ;-) gRAM always welcome ! GL Sapphire

 

This is future proofing right here, seeing how 3 GB of VRAM is becoming normal for 1080p, 4xAA and High-Rez textures.

 

2 of these in CF and 4K gaming and it will make a bit more sense.

But again, 8GB of vram... HOLY VRAM!

 

With h265 just around the corner !unless application plan to real time more?sapphire might need to give an example where this is useful (probably some form of bitcoint mining?)4gb was the sweat spot because file size system of window is 4gb .but this 8gb?I can't see its use ,it isnt ram ,so like most say it would be slow when used as a ram replacement !

 

That is A LOT of VRAM!

Two of these in Crossfire would be crazy, would love to know how you could max out the memory. Maybe at 4k or higher?

 

Going by whats out there at the moment, visually that is, there shouldnt be any need for anything above 3gb at say 1600p, any higher at that res and its just lazy dev work.

imo.

 

1) h.265 has not really much to do with vram.
2) No,you don't need that much vram for bitcoin/litecoin mining, not even remotely. If you would like an example where this much vram can be usefull, then take a look at game likes "thief" in 4k resolution (which uses almost 6GiB vram on max settings)
(3) There is no 4 GiB file-size limit in windows anymore (unless you are running windows 2000 and fat32), even if there was it wouldn't make any difference for the vram.
4) No, you can't use your vram as an System-RAM replacement although you could consider GDDR5 to be faster than DD3, but you can't really compare those 2 as they are specialized for their usage scenarios.

 

I seem to recall back in the day stuff being said along the lines of "512MB VRAM is too much, nothing needs that much" and various tunes to that same sound.

It's called progress, we should just take it in stride.

This is a sensible decision, if the memory frequency and timings aren't too impacted by cramming more of it on.

I wonder how similar the reaction will be once 32GB vram cards hit the market?

 

Yes, this is what a lot of people don't seem to grasp.

The frequencies are quite insane on GDDR5 vs DDR3, but the key here is DDR3 has very low latencies so they respond much faster, but haul less data overall, which is critical for general purpose computing tasks.

The most apt comparisons I can make are "GDDR are fast trucks and DDR are really fast cars" or "GDDR5 is a 8-lane 20KM road and DDR is a 4-lane 10KM road"

I think that might give people a better idea.

 

It's not future proofing because by the time you need 8gb of vram this card will be old and slow and sad and it will have no friends.

 

That's an exaggeration, since the card will be a solid performer for quite awhile.

High-end cards tend to stay relevant past 2-3 generations of newer cards.

4 generations usually starts to antiquate the part, but even then you're still looking at still solid performance on newer titles (that only then do most titles really start to take advantage of features introduced when the card was released)

 

I imagine they think there is a market for people who want to run 4K in cross/trifire.

The architecture probably only (easily) allows doubling up of the VRAM, hence 8GB.

 

Remember people, crossfiring doesn't actually double your VRAM. In theory, it does, but during gameplay both GPUs share almost entirely the same data, with some minor differences here and there. I would sincerely love to be proven wrong about this.

But anyway I think a GPU like this would actually appeal to some gamers. Some people who buy a GPU like this don't intend to upgrade for a very long time, so this model could still play games reasonably well for as much as 5 years in the future, assuming your display doesn't change and your CPU is good enough. Another appealing aspect about this is it won't be appealing to bitcoin and litecoin miners. I get the impression you really don't need much VRAM at all for mining so I don't think these people are going to want to spend that much extra for hardware they can't even take advantage of.

 

The only case I can come-up with is Battlefield 4. When using the Mantle Renderer, it uses so much VRAM that you can't really use the Resolution scale past 100%. If I set it to 150% it will be really choppy but not because the card can't take it: It just runs out of VRAM.

Like I said, 1 case

 

With all types of rendering used by Radeon cards it will never double and always be the same. So not even in theory.

 

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates

here's to the fake quote of the day c1:

I can see the whole 8GB used on high rez surround setups easily, so just because you don't need it doesn't mean some other people can't make use of it.
Always good to have options...

 

Well the reason it works in theory is because if you use the 2nd GPU to render something different, then the memory mapping can change. For example, in a game involving portals, one GPU could be used to render the room you're in but the 2nd GPU could be used to render the room inside the portal. This isn't how it actually works, but it COULD be coded to work that way. This is why I'm fond of things like physx, because a GPU dedicated to physx has a completely different set of tasks and therefore no redundancy (waste) in memory.

 

While this is true in AFR, mantle is intrucing asynchronous memory management, which will allow access to the full memory.