8800gts 2 1024mb - expectations

[Xenocrates]

Firstly, I'd like to welcome me to the forum and say what a pleasure it is to have me here.

There is supposed to be a 1gb gts; how would you expect it to perform compared to the 512? And how much extra would you expect it to cost (%).

If anyone knows when it's going to be available that would be nice too!

I'll be building a comp soon so I'd like to know.

 

[Margaret]

Barely any better than the 512, unless you go to like 2560x1600 (or whatever) which is GTX/Loltra territory.

 

[simonnance]

1GB Vram on a 256-bit bus.... that sound screwed up to anyone else?

 

[Xenocrates]

OK its going to be a lemon 'cept for big screen fellas!!

 

[perox]

If you've got a massive screen you may as well get a GTX as it can put its memory to use with its wider bus, so really there's no point in a 1GB GTS. Oh and it will no doubt cost more than a GTX anyway.

 

[Vertigo]

Utterly pointless - anything which benefits or requires 1GB over 512MB is, by definition, going to require shedloads of memory bandwidth too, so you'd be better off with a GTX in such situations.

 

[Corasik]

Unless they can get the ram running at 50% higher clock rates than the GTX, without slackening the timings... Unlikely to happen, and would carry a high cost premium. 50% higher clocks on 256bit would give the same bandwidth as a 384bit bus, and the higher clocks would actually give slightly reduced latency when pulling in small memory requests. Good in theory, expensive in practice which is why the GTX uses a wider buss in the first place.

 

[Lightnix]

You want way more bandwidth with that amount of memory.

Some people say it'll help stop hard drive thrashing, but if that's the concern, you may as well just buy another 2GB of main memory for £30 or so...

 

[Rroff]

There are very few games that use enough texture/3D data to warrant having more than 512Mb the only exception is if your playing in ultra quality + resolutions above 1920x

The interface width isn't really that much of a limitation - partly because in the situations where you'd need 1gig of memory your going to run hard into other issues like fillrate...