HD 2900xt 2gig (thats right, TWO)

[mruffin75]

Whatever happened to texture compression?? I remember years ago 3dfx (or 3Dfx or 3DFX...however they wanted to spell it), came out with a near lossless texture compression feature in their cards, however it was just on their cards and wasn't picked up by DirectX as far as I can remember...

I would've thought that instead of constantly upping the amount of RAM on these cards, it'd be more impressive to have say, 512MB and have the textures heavily compressed and still have great performance...

 

[Sylvanas]

Errr this is a great solution for workstations....nobody uses 32bit OS's with the standard 2GB RAM if you are in the 3dmodelling business so claiming this to be useless for that system is a stupid statement. Likelihood is that this card will cost $1500 but props to Diamond for being first out with it.

 

[rbV5]

Just to reiterate that the target for this class of hardware is a workstation running a 64bit OS (at least up to 128 GB memory support) with one of a number of 64bit graphic applications already available for some time now (Lightwave 64 has been available since Spring '05). All the major players Max, Maya Houdini, Softimage, Cinema 4D, Renderman..ect have 64bit versions.

 

[JustaGeek]

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
Errr this is a great solution for workstations....nobody uses 32bit OS's with the standard 2GB RAM if you are in the 3dmodelling business so claiming this to be useless for that system is a stupid statement. Likelihood is that this card will cost $1500 but props to Diamond for being first out with it.

Useless was a statement for a 32-bit OS.

Just read it before you use a word "stupid".

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: JustaGeek

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
Errr this is a great solution for workstations....nobody uses 32bit OS's with the standard 2GB RAM if you are in the 3dmodelling business so claiming this to be useless for that system is a stupid statement. Likelihood is that this card will cost $1500 but props to Diamond for being first out with it.

Useless was a statement for a 32-bit OS.

Just read it before you use a word "stupid".

C'mon now, you pwned yourself throughout the thread, no need to derail the discussion trying to defend your mistaken assumptions. Obviously you weren't aware of 64bit workstations...no biggie carry-on.

 

[JustaGeek]

Originally posted by: rbV5

Originally posted by: JustaGeek

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
Errr this is a great solution for workstations....nobody uses 32bit OS's with the standard 2GB RAM if you are in the 3dmodelling business so claiming this to be useless for that system is a stupid statement. Likelihood is that this card will cost $1500 but props to Diamond for being first out with it.

Useless was a statement for a 32-bit OS.

Just read it before you use a word "stupid".

C'mon now, you pwned yourself throughout the thread, no need to derail the discussion trying to defend your mistaken assumptions. Obviously you weren't aware of 64bit workstations...no biggie carry-on.

OK, let me rephrase my original statement then:

Totally redundant, unnecessary, and useless for all the 32-bit OS'.:laugh:

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: JustaGeek

Originally posted by: rbV5

Originally posted by: JustaGeek

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
Errr this is a great solution for workstations....nobody uses 32bit OS's with the standard 2GB RAM if you are in the 3dmodelling business so claiming this to be useless for that system is a stupid statement. Likelihood is that this card will cost $1500 but props to Diamond for being first out with it.

Useless was a statement for a 32-bit OS.

Just read it before you use a word "stupid".

C'mon now, you pwned yourself throughout the thread, no need to derail the discussion trying to defend your mistaken assumptions. Obviously you weren't aware of 64bit workstations...no biggie carry-on.

OK, let me rephrase my original statement then:

Totally redundant, unnecessary, and useless for all the 32-bit OS'.:laugh:

You keep repeating the same "useless" post, and I say "useless" because it falls under the "Capn Obvious" standard (no "actual" potential user would consider it for a 32bit OS in the first place)

You have more than half the posts in this particular thread, and none of them are on-topic when the "Capn Obvious" standard is applied, so basically you are derailing the on-topic discussion by defending your "useless post...ie:Trolling.

How about discussion of the actual hardware the OP linked in an actual environment for which it is targeted?, or are you going to continue to "Troll" the thread with your nonsense? Seriously.

 

[JustaGeek]

How about discussion of the actual hardware the OP linked in an actual environment for which it is targeted?, or are you going to continue to "Troll" the thread with your nonsense? Seriously.

No, I am not going to continue.

I am done here.

Will be back when the 64-bit OS becomes mainstream, and everyone can enjoy its advantages, including 2GB Video Cards and 128GB RAM systems.

Good luck!

 

[MarcVenice]

JustaGeek you also said: "Perhaps we need the software and hardware "slightly ahead of our times", but 99% of all users will be perfectly happy with the maximum of 1GB of VRAM and 3GB of RAM in their systems for another 1-2 years."

To bad the buyers of this product don't fit into that 1% category of users. You are also assuming that those people working at Diamond are a bunch of retards and haven't put any though into putting 2gb of ram on a videocard. That's making you look even worse. Fact is, you assume to much, and know to little or are afraid of using common sense and simple logic.

 

[CP5670]

It might be possible to softmod the usual 2900XT into this thing, although with less memory. That used to be doable on older cards. I think Nvidia did something to prevent it starting from the 7 series, but I haven't heard any such thing about ATI/AMD cards.

I'm no modeler, but I never saw the attraction of these things given that they don't actually improve rendering speed at all, but only the viewport framerates. Are they worth the $2000+ pricetags just for that?

 

[Modelworks]

Yes they are worth the price for viewport speed.
Lets say you have a model of a soldier that has 2 million polygons.
On that soldier you have to have textures for the face, the shirt, pants, weapon, boots, gloves, hair, eyes, etc.
Now for each texture you also have to have a number of maps for each texture.
One for specular, diffuse, bump, reflection would be just the basics.
Thats 4 textures for each item above.
So in that simple scene you now have 32 bitmaps.
Each bitmap is 16MB, and you don't want to use compression because of loss of detail and artifacts.
That right there is 512MB in textures alone.

You now don't have any memory left for the framebuffer or the gpu to do its work on a 512mb card.
If I have a 512MB card and I rotate the view the scene is going to pause, and I will have to wait till the card can update the scene as it swaps textures back and forth.
Having this happen every rotation as you work on the model is beyond annoying.

The workaround for low memory cards is to use compressed textures in viewports and switch to uncompressed textures in the render. Or you can turn off textures you don't need at the time.

Still not having to do the above would be welcome.

 

[Lord Banshee]

CP5670, there is little evidence off able to do the mod for the 2900XT series, yet. But still if you work in industry on an company computer it isn't acceptable for many reason being that it is not perfect in any means. I am using my X1950XT as a FireGL V7350 in WinXP. Some things are buggy but raw performance is there and thats i am have it modded .

Another thought about this product form the OP: Diamond is rename it from FireGL V8650 to this VFX2000. Seems they want to recap market share by not affiliating with FireGL. Might be a good idea as until now Nvida has always had the upper hand for workstations cards.

 

[Modelworks]

A setup I would almost kill for.
Look at the nvidia quadroplex.
http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html

 

[biostud]

http://theinquirer.net/?article=42073

 

[Modelworks]

I hope diamond makes sure that the drivers available from ATI will work with the card they release.
I don't want things to return to the way it was years ago when you had to go to the card maker to get the correct driver and the chipset maker would tell you, we don't provide end user driver support.

 

[Lord Banshee]

Yes that would suck

My guess is Diamond is going to use the ATI FireGL driver but change the ini file so it reads the name of whatever they call their "new" pro-cards.