Unveiling of the World's First 2GB Graphics Card

[Cyrus_the_virus]

This past Friday, we told you about certain rumors surrounding a possible release of a 2GB Radeon graphics card, coming from PowerColor. According to the rumors, which only surfaced once a set of photos with the card were posted on the ExpreView website, PowerColor was allegedly preparing for the release of a 2GB version of its HD 4850 card. Well, it appears that there’s rarely smoke without a fire as everything turned out to be true, and PowerColor has indeed rolled out the world's first 2GB graphics
card.

The new card was announced today, literally making PowerColor the very first manufacturer to have released a 2GB graphics card based on AMD's mid-range flagship model, the Radeon HD 4850. And, because such a product could not have been released with the stock single slot cooler, it has been equipped with custom cooling solution, provided by Zerotherm.

The new card has been dubbed PCS HD 4850 2GB and is obviously based on the already famous RV770 core chip. It packs no less than 800 stream processors and comes with an industry's first 2GB of GDDR3 high-speed memory. This is enough to enable it to provide the raw power it needs to tackle even the most intensive 3D games available on the market. In what regards other specifications, the new card will offer its users a factory set core speed of 665MHz and the same API support as all the other cards that are based on the latest AMD Radeon processors.

Regarding the name of the product, the PCS tag is an abbreviation for "Professional Cooling System," which should give users an idea of what PowerColor's graphics cards are equipped with. "PowerColor PCS solution ensures a cooler operating environment for GPU and memory for overclocking, also extend the product life," said Ted Chen, CEO of TUL Corporation. "We hope this new image could let gamers be much easier to recognize and deepen their impression about our own design Cooling System." he added.

Until the next high-end 2GB graphics card is revealed, we still have to wait for more details on the price of PowerColor's PCS HD 4850 2GB.

Source

[mavihs]

DANM!!!!! i want see it performance chart.

[xbonez]

will existing games utilise so much memory?

[Who]

useless it will perform badly compare against HD 4850 512 MB simply because HD 4850 chipset was made in mind for 512 MB , so increasing the memory will not increase any perfomances in a big way , actually i think you will see 1 or 2 less FPS compare to the 512 MB editions.

[dOm1naTOr]

Originally Posted by Easyforpp

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GTH

And finally some new custom coolers for 4850 has began to surface
BTW, there are rumors that 4870 X2 will come in 1Gb and 2Gb GDDR5 flavors...but sure, the X2 will be able to utilize the 2GB.

[Nimda]

2 Gb is something man! I still remember the Voodoo and Riva TNT days when 16Mb was a dream come true!! We've come a long way since then.. and it didn't take too long either

[thewisecrab]

Gr8 development..I mean 2GB memory for a GPU
Still, we need apps(read:games )that can actually utilise this raw power
as some believe(and i agree)that even 256-512MB will suffice for gaming and designing

[naveen_reloaded]

Insane!

[nvidia]

Thats nice but can the 4850 core make use of that much memory?
If the 4870 or the 4870X2 comes with that much memory then there will surely be a good difference in performance. But here i doubt whether we'll see any kind of improvement.

[dOm1naTOr]

the 256 bit GDDR3 is too slow to use full potential of 2GB.
But 2Gb wud be really nice if the 4870 X2 has it with GDDR5, and also with a 512bit memory b/w like the older 2900XT.
that wud probably hit more than 200GBps mem bandwidth!!!!

[Plasma_Snake]

O Baauji yeh bataao hai kitne ka?

[x3060]

i don't think its gonna make much of a difference , simply increasing the ram is not gonna make it rock the scores.

[Indyan]

2GB graphics card based on AMD's mid-range flagship model

Seems like just a clever gimmik to me. Gets them loads of press and thats all. A mid range card doesnt need 2gb. Increasing the clock speed is likely to give more significant performance boost.

[apoorva84]

we need a full test from the digit team!!!

[nvidia]

Originally Posted by Indyan

Seems like just a clever gimmik to me. Gets them loads of press and thats all. A mid range card doesnt need 2gb. Increasing the clock speed is likely to give more significant performance boost.

+1
Increasing the clocks will increase the performance by a small margin.

An 8500 with 1GB memory is available in the market.
A lot of people are not aware that VRAM does not decide the performance of a graphics card. When you ask someone which graphics you have, they usually reply by saying the amount of VRAM and not the core. I'm sure a lot of n00bs will find this card tempting.

[dOm1naTOr]

But the 2G is sure gonna benefit animation and gfx development.

[hullap]

Originally Posted by Indyan

Seems like just a clever gimmik to me. Gets them loads of press and thats all. A mid range card doesnt need 2gb. Increasing the clock speed is likely to give more significant performance boost.

true
and i dont think we require a 2gig gpu , for the time being

[Mohnishgs]

Originally Posted by Indyan

Seems like just a clever gimmik to me. Gets them loads of press and thats all. A mid range card doesnt need 2gb. Increasing the clock speed is likely to give more significant performance boost.

yeah you are right........... it does kind of seem like a gimmick........... it seems that they just wanted to bring out the first 2gb card................. how the hell is such card ever going to utilize so much memory............ it cant even run high end games at high detail

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Originally Posted by hullap

true
and i dont think we require a 2gig gpu , for the time being

Originally Posted by Indyan

Seems like just a clever gimmik to me. Gets them loads of press and thats all. A mid range card doesnt need 2gb. Increasing the clock speed is likely to give more significant performance boost.

Originally Posted by Mohnishgs

yeah you are right........... it does kind of seem like a gimmick........... it seems that they just wanted to bring out the first 2gb card................. how the hell is such card ever going to utilize so much memory............ it cant even run high end games at high detail

Guys, although it doesn't have much of a difference in actual performance, there is a lot of difference when it comes to higher resolutions. The problems with Mid Range were that although they had the performance to run most games decently, they couldn't do it at higher resolutions. This is going to solve that problem. This is like making a Mid end card to a high end with a slightly lesser clock speed.

So, please don't be fooled into thinking that it makes no differnce, now, you can game with a mid end card like this at high resolutions like on a 22" monitor without killing the card because of it's huge RAM and not to forget the higher bandwidth due to the Industry first GDDR5.

[dOm1naTOr]

very true
at higher resolutions, its more GPU intense athan memory intense, and the GPU just needs enuf amount of memory to store the the large nd heavy textures rather than less amount of fast memory.

[nvidia]

^^Do you mean to say that the extra 2GB will actually make some considerable difference at higher resolutions?

[topgear]

WOW!! Can that gpu utilise that all 2GB ram ??

[dOm1naTOr]

After all the card with 512 Mb is able to beat 9800GTX in some benchs at higher resolution. At such resolutions like 2560*1920, 512 MB is way too less to keep up with the GPU.
But maybe 1Gb was enuf for a 4850, but what if it dun cost a bomb? and just some 1~1.5k more expensive than regular 512Mb one...and it does have custom cooler too.

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Originally Posted by nvidia

^^Do you mean to say that the extra 2GB will actually make some considerable difference at higher resolutions?

http://www.pcmech.com/article/video-memory/

Calculating Memory Usage

To put it simply, the more memory, the better. For 2D, it doesn’t really matter. But, for 3D games, it is optimum to have gobs of memory on your video card in order to store the textures the game generates and thus be able to deliver the pictures quickly.

If you don’t play games, there is a mathematical equation to help you figure out just how much video memory you need. This depends on your resolution. The higher the resolution, the more memory you need, because each and every pixel on your screen must have a space in the memory for its data. Here is the computation: Lets say you would like to display 256 colors on a screen resolution of 640×480. At this resolution, there is 307,200 dots, or pixels. 256 colors requires 8 bits or data for each pixel. You can figure this because with an eight digit binary, there are 256 possible combinations. For two colors, you need only 1 bit, either on or off. For 16 colors, you need 4 bits, 2 to the 4th power. 256 colors requires 8 bits, and it goes up from there. Anyway, multiply the number of dots by the number of bits per pixel to get the number of bits for the entire screen.

307,000 x 8 = 2,457,600 bits.
There are eight bits per byte and 1,024 bytes per kilobyte. So…
2,457,600 / 8 = 307,200 bytes = 300K

This card will help 3D amimators and film industry to a very large extent because of the amount of RAM it's got which will help them render more complex 3D models in a single render frame!

[x3060]

cards dont really matter much while rendering in max,maya, after effects, combustion ,fusion etc...they use them only for viewing in screen (viewport),
for rendering proc is used.

[W i d e S c r e e N]

good news, thx 4 sharin, Cyrus_the_virus.
This sounds great for 24' users like me, goobi, and many more!

[dOm1naTOr]

Originally Posted by Cyrus_the_virus

This card will help 3D amimators and film industry to a very large extent because of the amount of RAM it's got which will help them render more complex 3D models in a single render frame!

yup and thats the reason most of the quadro and fire GL cards have 1/2Gb of GDDR3 memory even on a slower GPU models.

[shantanu]

i have been in gaming from a long time, i had my first card as TNT2 PRo M64 Nvidia with 32 mb , then i got GF2 ( 64) onboard in ASUS A7N 266 , then bought a Geforce 4(64 mb) , then i had a Ati X200 onboard then a 6200Ultra sucked on Ati chipset.. then a 7300GT, then 8800 and then 7900 and now

Ati is not that BAD, i say this being a Nvidia User from start

2 gigs will help in rendering the big 3D max things, wont do any good in gaming for another year or so

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Originally Posted by shantanu

2 gigs will help in rendering the big 3D max things, wont do any good in gaming for another year or so

It should for large open world games. Like crysis and Call of Juarez. Huge open worlds means lot more data to be rendered in a single frame and hence larger amounts of RAM will help ease the pressure on the GPU chip by storing these rendered frames rather than wasting time re-rendering it while running out of space to render the rest of the world.

[MetalheadGautham]

I think 1GB is enough for HD4850. Perhaps HD4870 when OverClocked can get great boosts with 2GB (or atleast 1.5GB) and that Power Cooling System.