PowerColor PCS HD4850 graphics card packs 2GB of memory

Remember how we all swooned over Diamond's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in June of last year? At the time, that was pretty much your only shot at seeing 1GB of memory on a single graphics card. Fast forward to now, and we've got what's widely believe to be this planet's very first 2GB card. The PowerColor PCS HD4850, which is based on the RV770 core, comes with 800 stream processors and two whole gigabytes of GDDR3 memory. And just think, next summer you'll be sticking your nose up to find GPUs emerging with "only" this much memory. So fickle, we are.

[Via PCLaunches]

[Uprising @ Jul 14th 2008 11:10AM]

RAWR

[TheGeektoriousBIG @ Jul 14th 2008 11:12AM]

Remember the Radeon 9700 days? Seems like prehistoric times compared to this card.

[maty @ Jul 14th 2008 11:23AM]

My old 256mb 9600! Wow, blistering 256mb of 200MHz memory, a 350MHz core and DX9 support! I was the envy of many back in the day!!

Alas, my lone 640mb 8800 GTS 'tis but a scratch by today's standard, and I can almost max out Crysis on it.

I'll consider one of these... make that two of these beauties once I have a CrossFire motherboard and some money `-.-.

[Mobius_1 @ Jul 14th 2008 11:59AM]

I use a Dell Latitude D600 laptop with a Mobility Radeon 9000 with 32MB VRAM, and only 512MB RAM... How times change and tech advances

[Nathan Otis @ Jul 14th 2008 12:22PM]

Voodoo 2 baby!

[Rogue_Genius @ Jul 18th 2008 7:16PM]

Your avatar = teh win!

[Rory @ Jul 14th 2008 11:14AM]

I stick my nose up at this now. Not really im just jealous that my computer would probably explode if i put it into the socket.

[TheGeektoriousBIG @ Jul 14th 2008 11:24AM]

LOL!

[z0phi3l @ Jul 14th 2008 11:14AM]

But is the card any good? I've never had an ATI card work well so I'm always cautious with them

[mike @ Jul 14th 2008 12:08PM]

Then you have been doing something very very wrong my friend. Next time you might want to let someone else install it for you?

[DESTOS @ Jul 14th 2008 11:15AM]

Next summer? My nose is already up.

[Rollins @ Jul 14th 2008 11:18AM]

But does it have enough bandwidth to even take advantage of all 2GB?

[Vasilis @ Jul 14th 2008 11:32AM]

When even the 4870X2 comes with "only" 1GB of memory I think the answer is not and that is just pure marketing. You will need resolutions of 27 - 30" monitors to maybe take advantage of the 2GB but at these resolutions the card will be on its knees with modern games.

[Wwhat @ Jul 14th 2008 11:48AM]

Didn't DX have limitations too on how much RAM it's designed to expect? I think to recall hearing something in that direction.

[Pfanne @ Jul 14th 2008 12:50PM]

thats not quite right...
the new ati cards perform quite well with these resolutions...

[jon @ Jul 14th 2008 12:52PM]

the more memory a card has, the more textures it can store on-board *without* having to do a lot of transferring between card and host. a single view of a scene isn't going to use 2GB of textures, but a single scene could easily make use of all of this memory, and if you have to swap textures in and out of video RAM every time you turn the camera around, *that's* when you run out of bandwidth. increasing the amount of RAM on cards is basically equivalent to loosening the collar around texture artists' necks and allowing a lot more visual detail to be designed into games.

with this much RAM, the size of your framebuffer is pretty much a non-issue in terms of RAM usage. a double buffered 2560x1600x32bit framebuffer uses 32MB, i.e. 1.5% of video RAM.

[Wwhat @ Jul 14th 2008 1:33PM]

From what I heard the RAM is interesting for non-graphics applications and new experiments like the voxel/raytrace one ATI used for that raytracing demo.
There's a youtube video in which the ATI guy says they didn't release that demo yet because the voxel/raytrace scenes need a LOT of RAM and they were busy compression it all so people can run it at home on normal systems, of course that was demoed on 2x4870 so I'm not sure having tons of RAM on a 4850 is helping much in those cases unless it's in crossfire maybe.

[loosely_coupled @ Jul 14th 2008 10:02PM]

Not even a 4870 could probably take advantage of 2GB! Such a waste! At least they could have put 2GB on a 4870, and it would be better worth it... the 4850's clocks are probably too low to get any benefit over 1GB..

[xcrunk @ Jul 14th 2008 11:23AM]

ATI's on the comeback!! Nice!!

We, the consumer wins. Now if they could only deliver an Quad Core killer.

[Pochi @ Jul 14th 2008 12:02PM]

I wouldn't really call cramming a bunch of memory onto a card a win for ATI.

[Rogue_Genius @ Jul 14th 2008 12:19PM]

"we wins" ? I suppose you went to the "all your base are belong to us" school of English? :)

[Kobutah @ Jul 14th 2008 11:26AM]

Eventhough a NVIDIA card with half the RAM or less will still beat this one silly.

[pmc64 @ Jul 14th 2008 11:38AM]

The only thing that beats it is the 280 and it cost $500. Hmm get the slightly better card and pay over twice as much or get the one that is $200.

[Levi @ Jul 14th 2008 11:33AM]

ATI released the firegl v8650 with 2GB of ram quite a while ago, admittedly this is a workstation card and costs considerably more but it does mean that this isn't the planets first gfx card with 2GB.

[Zaxour @ Jul 14th 2008 11:36AM]

GTX280? Haven't you seen that the 4850 is less than HALF the price of a 280? And it basically meets or beats the 260. And then there's the 4870 which meets or beats the 280, and still costs less. And then the 4870X2 slaps the 280 silly. Where have you been?

[Kurian @ Jul 14th 2008 11:39AM]

2GB of precious DDR3 wasted on a 4850. It doesn't have the performance to use it.

[TravisO @ Jul 14th 2008 3:27PM]

The ATI fanboys can rank the post down all they want, it doesn't change the fact the 4850 isn't really so high end that it could really do anything that would require 2GB of ram. Even 1gb of ram is overkill. Now if this was a 4870 then I would be more impressed.

The 4850 is a middle tier card, the 4870 is a high end card, apples and oranges people!

[Ihar `Philips` Filipau @ Jul 14th 2008 11:44AM]

I can imaging those hunting for accelerate their SETI@home or Folding on cheap would be buying this in bulks.

Otherwise 2GB on 4850 (not 4870!) is definitely overkill.

[Jon @ Jul 14th 2008 11:49AM]

Does any game know what to do with 2GB?

Given that you've only got to go back about 3 years (F.E.A.R.) to see the point at which developers started recommending 512MB, I'd guess there's not much out there that's recommending 1GB and certainly (again, my guess) nothing that's going to show a significant difference with 1GB. Even Crysis only really needs 512GB for higher resolutions.

(Admittedly all bets are off if you're running 2500xsomething resolution... but then you're not going to try that on a single graphics card and expect to enjoy it)

And by the time there are games which can use 2GB, people are going to laugh at your puny 4850.

I suspect this card is for the "my card's better than your card" people and folks with more than half a brain should be saving their money.

[Jon @ Jul 14th 2008 11:51AM]

oops - spot the typo :-)

[ImarisTechSuppot @ Jul 14th 2008 12:23PM]

This is extremely interesting for the scientific 3D visualization community. We need *gobs* of texture memory.. as in 3D live cell microscopy and analysis. This could be the perfect card.. when you want to open multi- gigabyte images.. lots of potential for great sub resolution image caching here. (ie, how do you open a single 50 gb image and look at it all at once, then at full resolution - solution, you open only the part that will fit on the screen at once - more texture memory makes this easy, and fast.. )

[Steven @ Jul 14th 2008 1:35PM]

512MB* ;)

[SoloSalsa @ Jul 15th 2008 12:58PM]

Try opening a five floor mansion in The Sims 2 with a thousand pieces of custom content furniture. A huge dynamic game like that has tons of different objects, and always makes use of memory.
It could run relatively smoothly on a Radeon 7200 with only 64 MiB VRAM, when the point of view holds still. But turn the camera a bit, shifting the scene to another room, and it will be incredibly choppy while moving. When the camera holds still on one room, the graphics are smooth again.

[Wwhat @ Jul 14th 2008 11:50AM]

Also it's a bit of a dumb monster if it can't even do DX10.1.

[nh @ Jul 14th 2008 11:58AM]

Wow, I remember when my mate's cutting edge Voodoo with 12MB RAM was putting my Matrox Millenium with 4MB to shame.

But when did memory requirements of graphics cards catch up with that of the main PC? Back then I had 128MB (i.e. 32 times as much), now I have 4GB (i.e. only twice as much as this).

[kal326 @ Jul 14th 2008 1:37PM]

@nh
I dont know either, but I had 128MB EDO with a 4MB S3 Virge after upgrading the system from the 16MB FastPage and a 1MB Cirrus Logic card that came in it. My upgraded system could play all the large maps in Total Annihilation back in the day. Interstate 76 played quite nice as well in all of its DirectX 3 glory. Those were the days....

[Oinquer @ Jul 16th 2008 7:19AM]

...i hope you had a couple of ATI's and not only one...
i have about 5 or 6 ATI's until now and never one failed me...
its true ATI its not in the front but their cards are reliable

[Ninjakamster (PS360 FTW!) @ Jul 14th 2008 12:08PM]

2gb video ram seems way overkill for a mid to high range card.

I love my 512meg HD4850! : D

[Galley @ Jul 14th 2008 12:31PM]

I remember buying A Formula One game back in '98 or so. It required a dedicated video card with 8MB of RAM. Those were the days!

[clint @ Jul 14th 2008 1:32PM]

isn't that RAM in the video card counted against the 3GB limit in 32 bit operating systems? if thats the case you would only have 1GB of direct RAM for usage, which would be detrimental to game performance

[Wwhat @ Jul 14th 2008 1:43PM]

The limit is 4GB technically, the reason not-well setup systems can only do 3GB is because IO is mapped to the addressspace and becomes locked, but a modern CPU and BIOS can have the MMU in the CPU map it so you can use more than 3GB RAM, but not more than 4GB on 32bit systems though, google for howto's.
Bur nobody forces you to use a 32bit OS do they?

[mattclarkie @ Jul 14th 2008 12:46PM]

This is good for people like me who game on Consoles. We can buy very good spec cards for video playback and Aero for £20 all of which were £400 just 12months ago because manufacturers 'Willy Wave' by just cramming more and more RAM on the new models.

[Chewedtoothpick @ Jul 14th 2008 12:58PM]

This certainly is not the first video card with 2GB of ram...

There are workstation graphics cards with 8gb... I remember 5 years ago looking at one that had 2gb and wondering why they didn't do that on consumer cards.

Hell, this certainly isn't the first as you have been able to get a 2gb fireGL on Newegg since about sept last year.

[Wwhat @ Jul 14th 2008 1:52PM]

Those cards are designed to use OpenGL though, and interestingly OpenGL3.0 (maybe even 3.1) is suppose to be announced in august.

[Wwhat @ Jul 14th 2008 1:39PM]

People should really stop comparing RAM on these modern graphics cards with the old generation GPU's with a lot of RAM, it's obvious that as the GPU becomes more like a multi-core CPU the RAM gets a whole new meaning and new functions, like the matrix calculations done for physics needs a lot of data but that's not framebuffer data but merely data needed for calculations.
You don't just use RAM for pushing it to the RAMDAC anymore.

[TravisO @ Jul 14th 2008 3:30PM]

The 4gb limit is on 32bit Windows and your system ram, it has NOTHING to do with what's inside your video card.

[Mike @ Jul 14th 2008 4:44PM]

TravisO, that is NOT true, your video ram DOES count in that limit.

http://www.ibuypower.com/images/4GBInfo.pdf

[Hamidxa @ Jul 14th 2008 1:54PM]

A marketing gimmick, pure and simple.

While I admire ATI for developing such an amazing price/performance based core, this particular card however is for all intents and purposes, a gimmick.

If you think about it, the only time you would need such a massive amount of memory on a card is either when you are dealing with huge amounts of textures (which is rare in of itself, save for mods such as those that can be found in Oblivion ... but even then, 1 GB will suffice), or if you plan on increasing the resolution up beyond the 1920x1200 range while cranking the AA / AF up, to the point where it may saturate a 512MB buffer in some games/apps, but by then, RAM is not what will be holding you back entirely either. Instead, it will be the GPU that will serve as the bottleneck, especially when the GPU is this particular one.

In other words, no one will likely see any real-world benefit from this card because in the scenarios that could make use of the RAM, the GPU will be the bottleneck.

I wonder how many suckers are going to buy it anyways.

[Die in a Fire @ Jul 14th 2008 2:11PM]

I laugh at the inevitable "enthusiast" who puts this in a system with XP/Vista 32bit with 4GB of normal RAM. Enjoy having more than half of your memory address space wasted!

[Wolfticket @ Jul 14th 2008 2:58PM]

2GB is quite an impressive amount of memory for a graphics card (more than the total ram the system I am typing on).
However, I imagine for gaming you would be better off with 1GB of stupidly fast GDDR5 (like on the 4870) than 2GBs or GDDR3.
Maybe this card will have it's uses though (budget workstation?).