What's with ignoring the mmo player market?

[Amaron]

I just had to rant about this as it's been bugging me for a long time. Why do the video card makers always slap the big memory on stupid super expensive cards or really craptastic ones? I know the memory adds cost on the super expensive ones but what I mean is they typically add the 512 mb configs only to their really expensive chip lines. It seems a few companies defy this and toss 512mb's on a budget card but that's about it.

The only thing I've found even close to a good card for MMO gamers is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814121216

Only problem is it has a craptastic 128mb memory interface! Even still I'm betting this card would outperform cards that cost 500+ dollars that only have 256mb's in some mmo's (like EQ2 at ultra high settings). Simply due to the fact that mmo's don't really bask in poly's but they load enough textures to cause the equivalent of memory thrashing by sending back info between system memory and vid card memory.

Just ranting and wondering if anyone else out there has been feeling the same on this issue.

Also I was wondering if anyone could comment on how much that 128mbit interface is going to effect speeds in normal games? Like 10~20% compared to a card with 256? Keep in mind I don't really like fps's so you'll never see me play something like HL2 or Far Cry. My only worry is the single player games like Oblivion.

 

[BassBomb]

basically, 1000mhz 256 bit is like 2000mhz 128 bit... that card is very useless and a bad buy

if ur buying it just cuz it suddenly has 512 mb thats a very incorrect decision to make... like i did cuz i saw an FX5200 with 256 mb :S

slap on an extra 20 bucks and you could get a 7600GT which would rape that card back and forth

 

[Amaron]

Originally posted by: BassBomb
slap on an extra 20 bucks and you could get a 7600GT which would rape that card back and forth

With 512 mb's? I don't think so. I can't even find a 7600GT with 512 mb's!

You seemed to miss the problem. MMO's use way more vmem than even a game like HL2. Sure the textures blow but every player has his own combination of textures and as soon as I get into some pvp with a few hundred people on screen the video card blows up from each and every single bizzare texture loading up.

It's like having a computer with all the fastest stuff and then giving it 512 megs of main system memory. No matter what you do the hard drive starts thrashing because the games are pushing everything into virtual memory. End result is all that fancy crap you bought is worthless.

By the time I play a mmo that really requires the poly's a 7600GT can push I'll need 512 mb's vmem at the very least!

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: Amaron

Originally posted by: BassBomb
slap on an extra 20 bucks and you could get a 7600GT which would rape that card back and forth

With 512 mb's? I don't think so. I can't even find a 7600GT with 512 mb's!

You seemed to miss the problem. MMO's use way more vmem than even a game like HL2. Sure the textures blow but every player has his own combination of textures and as soon as I get into some pvp with a few hundred people on screen the video card blows up from each and every single bizzare texture loading up.

It's like having a computer with all the fastest stuff and then giving it 512 megs of main system memory. No matter what you do the hard drive starts thrashing because the games are pushing everything into virtual memory. End result is all that fancy crap you bought is worthless.

By the time I play a mmo that really requires the poly's a 7600GT can push I'll need 512 mb's vmem at the very least!

You are incorrect. MMOs often need a lot of system RAM. The performance gain from having excessive amounts of video RAM on your card would be pretty minimal. The inverse of your argument is also true. You wouldn't want to have a computer with a 300Mhz Celeron with 4GB of system RAM to play modern games on, would you? The weaker graphics chips are too slow to use AA or other features that use more video memory, and even demanding games are barely starting to need 256MB graphics cards. If your MMO really needed a 512MB graphics card to handle the textures in the game well a cheap graphics card wouldn't have the raw fillrate or shader power to effectively do anything with that many textures at once.

 

[v8envy]

MMOs are no different a problem than many first person shooters.

Having a buttload of on-board ram is no good if the pipe to that ram is a straw. Yes, you can keep the textures loaded -- but you can do that in main system ram too. If you can't keep the textures moving along to apply them to polygons, what good did it do you?

A card with a low end GPU and lots of slow video ram connected to the GPU by only 64 wires is just pure marketing. There are '512 meg' X1300s and 6200s. That doesn't mean they'll do any better in your application than their 128 meg cousins. (Or even 64 meg cousins.)

Vertex processing power has nothing to do with this. Just because your MMO has ass-looking character models doesn't mean you don't need a powerful GPU to render the scenes. There's more to it than just meshes.

So in summary: ultra-budget cards with lots of slow ram is marketing to people who don't know any better, and wind up paying more for an infereor 256 or 512 meg card over a vastly faster 128 meg card. Hell, there are 512 meg X1600Pros out there, priced like enthusiast cards. I'm sure at least one person bought one of those over a 256 meg 7800GT for the same price.

And high end cards do have the GPU rendering oomph and raster ops to spare to make use of 256 megs or more.

And that's why you have lots of ram on very cheap and very expensive cards, and not so much on things in between.

And I'm willing to take your bet that the 512 meg 6800NU will outperform cards with 'only 256mb'. A 7600GT should beat that card handily in ANY game, and a 7900GT would be like a 5 year old trying to fight Mike Tyson. How much shall we bet?

 

[Amaron]

You are incorrect. MMOs often need a lot of system RAM. The performance gain from having excessive amounts of video RAM on your card would be pretty minimal.

No I'm correct but you are also correct that MMO's need a great deal of system ram. They deffinetly need more vram too though than your average game. At least if you compare them to equivalent graphics engines that are not mmo's apples to apples.

If your MMO really needed a 512MB graphics card to handle the textures in the game well a cheap graphics card wouldn't have the raw fillrate or shader power to effectively do anything with that many textures at once.

Well first off I already know of one MMO that -needs- 512 vram (everquest 2). I don't play it but it clearly shows that a mmo with a not so impressive graphics system can still require a ton of vram.

I see a lot of people talking about crazy res's like 1600*1200 with aa no less and that blows my mind. I see people having performance problems (on good computers with 200 dollar cards and 1~2 gigs system memory) at 1024*768 with no frills turned on (like in PvP where the fps starts to actually matter).

I'm not saying you are wrong though (about the fillrate/shader power point). You're probably correct in fact and you've answer my question to why they are ignoring the mmo market (ie they can't really make a middle end card with more video memory).

 

[Amaron]

Originally posted by: v8envy
MMOs are no different a problem than many first person shooters.

Having a buttload of on-board ram is no good if the pipe to that ram is a straw. Yes, you can keep the textures loaded -- but you can do that in main system ram too. If you can't keep the textures moving along to apply them to polygons, what good did it do you?

Where are the cards with a buttload of on-board ram with a big pipe then? That was my original question! I know that a card with a crappy pipe sucks (like the one I posted).

There's more to it than just meshes.

Sadly I think WoW with all the bells and whistles turned off (ie no bloom no shaders etc) is pretty much just meshes with textures on them. Yet that game still dies on a decent computer if the video memory is too little. Why? Perhaps I'm wrong but I'd like to know what the real reason is if I am.

Something about MMO's is different enough that computers which can handle even multiplayer FPS's easily end up crawling in an MMO with much simpler graphics? The only variable I can see though is that an FPS loads much less textures even if they are often much more detailed. True there is more CPU load in an MMO too but I still see the problems on computers with high quality cpu's.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: Amaron

Originally posted by: v8envy
MMOs are no different a problem than many first person shooters.

Having a buttload of on-board ram is no good if the pipe to that ram is a straw. Yes, you can keep the textures loaded -- but you can do that in main system ram too. If you can't keep the textures moving along to apply them to polygons, what good did it do you?

Where are the cards with a buttload of on-board ram with a big pipe then? That was my original question! I know that a card with a crappy pipe sucks (like the one I posted).

There's more to it than just meshes.

Sadly I think WoW with all the bells and whistles turned off (ie no bloom no shaders etc) is pretty much just meshes with textures on them. Yet that game still dies on a decent computer if the video memory is too little. Why? Perhaps I'm wrong but I'd like to know what the real reason is if I am.

Something about MMO's is different enough that computers which can handle even multiplayer FPS's easily end up crawling in an MMO with much simpler graphics? The only variable I can see though is that an FPS loads much less textures even if they are often much more detailed. True there is more CPU load in an MMO too but I still see the problems on computers with high quality cpu's.

The expensive cards are already pushing it in terms of RAM technology, to the point that for them double the amount of RAM on the card usually means they have to go with slower RAM as fast RAM of that density may simply not exist yet.

MMOs have to deal with the latency and bandwith issues of far more clients than even a multiplayer fps type game does.

 

[BassBomb]

the card you posted also has old school DDR2, with slow clockspeed compared to the newer GDDR3 at a much higher speed

 

[Demoth]

Technically, MMOs should not have any additional vid card memory requirements. Realistically, many use additional memory fully because they are badly coded. Even graphically primitive games like Shadowbane have major issues. WoW dosen't seem to suffer from this but EQ2 does. And the new D&D game by Turbine has the inability to purge the vid memory, so the longer you play, the more you will slow down until rebooting, with more vid card memory allowing a long time to play normally.

In a well coded game like WoW, system RAM is what matters. Otherwise, just having a good graphics engine is fine regardless of the card's memory. If your using a 128 meg 6600GT in WoW, you can pretty much max out without any issues.

 

[jahutch]

If WoW is what you are trying to play, you don't need a beast of a system. It ran quite playably on a laptop with a Radeon 9200 mobility I used to have! It ran smooth as silk on my current machine (A64 2.5Ghz), basically maxed graphics settings, 1280x1024, 4xAA and 4x AF, and I've only got a 128Mb Geforce 6800. At the time I played WoW I had 1gig of RAM.

WoW also ran VERY well on my old computer - a P4 2.53GHz, 1gig ram, Radeon 9700 128Mb. I couldn't use AA and such but it ran smoothly with a lot of eye candy at 1280x1024.

The fact is, WoW is one of the least intensive games on the market today. It looks good through stylistic art design - its graphics engine is comparatively quite simple. Now that I've switched to EQ2 though.. man that game is a beast. I wouldn't necessarily say its badly coded, because the complexity of the graphics is several orders above WoW, but my system certainly has trouble with it in certain areas.

 

[v8envy]

Originally posted by: Amaron

Where are the cards with a buttload of on-board ram with a big pipe then? That was my original question! I know that a card with a crappy pipe sucks (like the one I posted).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102697

and

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814103008

45+ gigabytes/sec memory bandwidth, 512 megs. Just what the doctor ordered. $349 and $439 respectively, plus $5 shipping.

A midrange card with a powerful GPU, 512 megs of ram and a 256 bit interface to fast ram would be.... a high end card! Just like those two.

There are 512 meg versions of the 7900GTX as well. The pricing and availability on them is not quite so favorable, however.

Something about MMO's is different enough that computers which can handle even multiplayer FPS's easily end up crawling in an MMO with much simpler graphics? The only variable I can see though is that an FPS loads much less textures even if they are often much more detailed. True there is more CPU load in an MMO too but I still see the problems on computers with high quality cpu's.

It's been discussed. One, it could be you're loading huge amounts of textures off disk the first time you see them in-game. Lots more video ram wouldn't help there. Two, many of the low frame rate chugfests in WoW busy areas have to do with the network. Animating several hundred models at the same time can also be more than even a 'high quality' cpu can handle. The difference in performance between a 2 ghz low end 3000+ and 2.8 ghz FX60 is... less than 50% for single threaded apps. Which is 99.9% of existing games, MMO or not. Considering app performance isn't linear with clock speed increase, we're talking a possible 25% difference between a low end rig and a high end one if CPU is the limiter. If your cpu is limiting you to 12 fps animating hundreds of models with the $130 CPU, the $1000 cpu will have you at 15 fps. Not a big leap up.

I simply disbelieve a 7900GT with 256 megs of ram is going to perform like ass when a midrange card with 512 meg (e.g, X1600Pro with 512M) will do fine in the same machine over the same connection.

In summary, no special hardware is required for MMOs. Smart selection of components to optimize for slightly different behaviors of MMO games vs FPS will yield better results.