Is it just me ?

[Phage]

Or this getting ridiculous ? 6Gb VRAM !

http://translate.google.co.uk/transl...d-7970-vapor-x

(Props to OCUK member Final8ty)

[scaryjim]

Ridiculous? Yes, absolutely. But no doubt there will be enough e-peen warriors out there for Sapphire to sell a few, and that's all they need to do with a ridiculously high end card.

On the other hand - check those OC frequencies 1300 core, 1900 memory? That's, what, 7600 effective? Bejesus...

[=assassin=]

Wow, seems a bit overkill. I'd love to see a review that showed whether it has any advantage with 6gb VRAM at all.

[kalniel]

Ridiculous? Yes, absolutely. But no doubt there will be enough e-peen warriors out there for Sapphire to sell a few, and that's all they need to do with a ridiculously high end card.

On the other hand - check those OC frequencies 1300 core, 1900 memory? That's, what, 7600 effective? Bejesus...

I'll take two in a 7990 please

Looks like AMD have left themselves a LOT of headroom with these chips, which was kind towards the competition...

[Phage]

I'll take two in a 7990 please

And some crumpets.

Looks like AMD have left themselves a LOT of headroom with these chips, which was kind towards the competition...

Probably wanted to avoid the toasty reputation of the first Fermis.

[kalniel]

Probably wanted to avoid the toasty reputation of the first Fermis.

I don't think the 7900 series get particularly hot when clocked. It seems they just underestimated how well the fabrication process did after early samples.

[Phage]

Seems a little unlikely that testing wouldn't have revealed heat/max performance. Surely they would have tested to see what the envelope was ?

[andy572]

I haven't yet got used to that much system RAM or the fact that my graphics card has 512MB, so I'm another one to look twice at a 6-gig card!

Has 2GB been useful for recent games when using high AA and AF settings? Have things progressed enough that it cab be pushed with high resolutions and lots of textures? How does that scale with multiple screens?

[kalniel]

Seems a little unlikely that testing wouldn't have revealed heat/max performance. Surely they would have tested to see what the envelope was ?

They apparently test early silicon for likely envelopes and set expectations accordingly. Testing of actual chips after they're produced is only for validation/binning, hence conservative clocks for Tahiti. Pitcain and Cape Verde were sufficiently down the line that the later results from Tahiti could influence them and raise the clocks to what we now know the current process is capable of.

If that's true (and the only reason it wouldn't be is because AMD were spinning, as it came from an AMD guy), then it's quite revealing of AMDs agility to alter product spec (ie, not that slow or that quick!)

I haven't yet got used to that much system RAM or the fact that my graphics card has 512MB, so I'm another one to look twice at a 6-gig card!

Has 2GB been useful for recent games when using high AA and AF settings? Have things progressed enough that it cab be pushed with high resolutions and lots of textures? How does that scale with multiple screens?

Hexus recently did a mutli-screen test, and you can see other sites reviews as well. It ultimately depends on the game. Something like Rage will take all the VRAM it can, but that's quite an unusual engine. BF3 needs 1.5gb or greater on highest settings. But those are outliers at the moment.

[DanceswithUnix]

Perhaps, given the compute ability of these cards, they are hoping to pick up some OpenCL customers? Games are only just breaking the 1GB VRAM requirement, 2GB should be fine for gaming for a year or two.

[kalniel]

Perhaps, given the compute ability of these cards, they are hoping to pick up some OpenCL customers? Games are only just breaking the 1GB VRAM requirement, 2GB should be fine for gaming for a year or two.

Or DirectCompute, which they absolutely monster. Problem (for AMD) is compute customers vastly prefer nVidia's professional cards, largely because of software verification I think.

[andy572]

I'll look around for the relevant items, kalniel. As I'm far from that market, I don't follow developments very closely. In line with your confirming figures, I couldn't imagine the memory needs to be all that great (possibly the same textures and polygon counts, for example) but I'm not up to speed with hardware or software in this respect.

I did also wonder about the 'compute' functionality, as I know nothing at all of how that's used in games or applications. Likewise, I don't know if it's simply about a set of instructions on the hardware or whether the card memory is used too (where if true, large sets of data and that memory could make sense).

I've got lots of reading to do!