When manufacturers need to empty their stock of components, we see some news like this G98-based keychain. Today, it seems there is a big stock of DDR3 memory somewhere because POV (Point Of View) is about to release a GeForce GTX 550 Ti with 4096MB of DDR3 memory (this kind of memory was the standard at the time of the GTX 280). Four times the amount of memory of the tregular GTX550 Ti: 1024MB of GDDR5 memory are present on NVIDIA’s reference board (see this new: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Launched). Why so much memory on a non high-end graphics card? This GTX 550 Ti will be priced at 113 euros…
why so much mem? to fool someone.
Why in the world would you put that much memory on such a low end card, that card can hardly perform well enough to even use that amount of memory.
imagine a triple of these accelerating rendering of mental-images iRay (3dsmax2012), no sli needed.
vram is a limiting factor for complex scene rendering on GPUs. usable system RAM is also limited by vram when rendering on both CPU+GPU.
so while memory limit remains 4gb (mirrored) for a 3x GTX550 ti 4gb setup, they should cost less than a gtx580 3gb edition, add 1GB and 12.5% cuda cores total.
afaik, iRay does not prefer quadro over geforce. its only cuda cores, clocks and vram that matters.
and may I add, dual-GPU’s effective memory is exactly half the advertized number. also radeons aren’t supported.
What’s the point in having so much VRAM if you bottleneck the memory throughput with a slow memory bus like DDR3.
I’m still have Radeon 4850 with 512Mb GDDR3 and I can play almost all new games with maximum settings )))
DDR3 is not GDDR3, the performance are much more cripped