StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The 8800 GT is markedly faster, but the gaming experience and longevity aren't going to be significantly different. Personally I chose the 9600 GT.

Sputnik wrote:(Side note: Another interesting read from TR is regarding excessive video ram here - save your $$)

Dominus Atheos wrote:Those guys are dumbasses. They stuck 4gb of ram in their test machine, and think it would be a really good idea to run the whole rig on the 32-bit version of windows.

And then to top it all off, they do a comparison of MEMORY AMOUNTS! Fucking goat-fucking retards.

phongn wrote:

Dominus Atheos wrote:Those guys are dumbasses. They stuck 4gb of ram in their test machine, and think it would be a really good idea to run the whole rig on the 32-bit version of windows.

There's nothing particularly wrong with doing that, aside from the whole issue where idiotic driver writers forced Microsoft to ensure that you couldn't use more than ~3.25GB or so in XP SP2 and later.

Furthermore, the test system in question had 2GB of RAM, not 4GB.

And then to top it all off, they do a comparison of MEMORY AMOUNTS! Fucking goat-fucking retards.

Er, where?

Dominus Atheos wrote:The review I quoted. They compared the performance of video cards with different amounts of memory. Not as much of an issue since they actually were only using 2 gigs in the system memory, but they still tested SLIed gig cards, and then call it "inexplicable" when it delivers lower frame rates then the 512 SLI rig. Well no shit, you got one card with 1 gig, and one card with about 256 megs of accessible ram.

phongn wrote:

Dominus Atheos wrote:The review I quoted. They compared the performance of video cards with different amounts of memory. Not as much of an issue since they actually were only using 2 gigs in the system memory, but they still tested SLIed gig cards, and then call it "inexplicable" when it delivers lower frame rates then the 512 SLI rig. Well no shit, you got one card with 1 gig, and one card with about 256 megs of accessible ram.

I'm still trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about. The comparison looks entirely straightforward: 256MB, 512MB and 1GB cards in single or SLI configurations, compared. Nothing indicates that they're attempting heterogeneous memory configurations, and I'm not even sure if you can make SLI work that way.

And the "inexplicable" part was referring to 1GB vs. 512MB configurations in either single-GPU or SLI configurations, not 1GB single-GPU vs. 512MB SLI. No mention is made of 256MB configurations in that paragraph.

Windows users can see all of the reserved memory areas on their PC in Device Manager, using the View -> Resources By Connection option. This is what that view looks like for the PC I'm using now.

The addresses are all in hexadecimal, which makes it less than instantly obvious to the untutored viewer which reserved areas are tiny (and usually old) and which large (and all relatively new). Spend the time to figure it out, though, and you can see the old backward-compatibility stuff and the new 3Gb-barrier stuff, plain as day.

Hex addresses A0000 to BFFFF, for instance, are still assigned to the video card (a GeForce 7800 GT, in this case). That's addresses 655360 to 786431 in decimal, 640 kilobytes to 768k. This is the old 128 kilobyte reservation for the monochrome, CGA and EGA graphics buffers, still there in case you find your old Leisure Suit Larry disk and want to see if it works.

In the above picture, though, you'll see a much more considerable reservation from C0000000 to CFFFFFFF, that's also assigned to my video card. That's 268,435,456 bytes, equal to the 256 megabytes of memory on the card, and it's the chunk of memory addresses that system devices use when they want to access the card's memory.

If I had a video card with 512Mb or 768Mb of memory on it, it'd take up even more space in the 3Gb-to-4Gb memory map.

And if I were still using an AGP graphics card, there'd be another block of memory reserved for the AGP aperture, used when devices on other buses in the computer want to talk to a graphics card on the AGP bus. I've got a PCIe graphics card, though, which sits on the same bus as all of the other stuff and so doesn't need an aperture.

(If you've got a computer with one of those cheap graphics adapters that uses system memory instead of having RAM of its own, it will of course eat some of your RAM no matter how much you've got installed.)

Power users with a hankerin' for dual graphics cards may be experiencing something of a sinking feeling, at this juncture. Yes, the 256Mb reserved for my little old graphics card means exactly what you think it means: Those two 768Mb graphics cards you can totally justify buying will eat one point five gigabytes of your 32-bit memory map all by themselves, cutting you down to a 2.5Gb ceiling before you even take the other reservations into account.

This also explains why 1Gb graphics cards haven't hit the consumer market yet. Nobody yet needs anything like that much memory on one card for any desktop computer purpose, but some people would still be very happy to pay for such a card just for the pose value. It'd eat the whole of the fourth gigabyte of their system memory, though. And then they'd probably demand their money back.

(This fact has apparently not stopped certain unscrupulous companies, coughDellcough, from allowing people to buy a computer with WinXP, 4Gb of RAM, and a pair of Nvidia's oddball 1Gb GeForce 7950 GX2 cards. Result: 56.25% of the installed memory absent without leave. You might as well have only bought 2Gb.)

Dominus Atheos wrote:The 3.25 limit applies to all memory in the system, including the system ram, the CPU cache, the buffer on the hard drive, and the video memory. You haven't heard about it? This website provides a good explanation:

Beowulf wrote:Hmm... I think the explanation is mostly accurate, it's just he's misinterpreting it. It's a 4GB limit, and it's only the memory mapped ranges that end up eating out of RAM. The largest of which, by far, is the GPU. Everything else adds up to less than a MB, typically.