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980GTX: 256 bit GDDR5 ?

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ajy0903

Member
Joined
Apr 23, 2011
Location
USA
I just saw spec of 980GTX.

256 bit GDDR5, what the hack?

I thought 780GTX had 384 bit GDDR5?

And I also thought the memory of graphic card don't matter but, bit (256/318) those stuffs are far more important?

How come they lowered the 384 bit GDDR5 to 256 bit GDDR5?

Is it because of lower power consume?
 
@Method320:
Thanks for reply.
Then what happens to those nVidia Surround (2D Surround) and nVidia 3D Vision Surround with 3 monitors on surround mode and 4th as accessory?
Will this 256bit works with those above set ups?
 
@Method320:

Thanks for reply.

One thing I got to learn about those "3D Vision, 3D Vision Surround, nVidia Surround", people said it is actually bandwidth (192/256/318-Bit) that matters, even if the graphic card has higher vRAM in order to use 3 monitors for "3D Vision, 3D Vision Surround, nVidia Surround" and 1 extra monitor as accessory.

So, since it says 980GTX has 256-Bit, that's why I asked the question thread.
 
The same story as with GTX680. They just know that top version will have 384 bit but we will have to wait couple of months for that.
GTX680 also wasn't planned as top version but nvidia had big issues with production and they rebranded lower chip as GTX680 and bumped price before premiere. We got higher series as GTX700 with wider bus etc. when they solved production issues.

GTX970 is at least in reasonable price, not like GTX670 which after premiere cost almost like HD7970 but was much slower.
 
@Woomack: Oh, ok. Guess I have to wait more time for them to get "384 bit GTX980".
 
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I wonder if going to a 384-bit memory data bus w/high-end Maxwells will force the VRAM config to be either 3 GiB or 6 GiB?
 
with current density more like 6GB or 12GB but 3GB is also possible. I just think they will release 6GB version which will replace GTX780Ti and 12GB version as new Titan.
 
I wonder if going to a 384-bit memory data bus w/high-end Maxwells will force the VRAM config to be either 3 GiB or 6 GiB?
It will because that is how it (has to) work...look at past cards and note their bandwidth and capacity. ;)

64/128/256/512 bit bus = 2/4/8GB vRAM
192/384/768 bit bus = 1.5/3/6GB vRAM.
 
A video card with 12 GiB of DDR5 memory -- hard to wrap my mind around that concept. It's too bad they can't use the vast quantities of unused video RAM for something else when not gaming. Maybe a disk cache?
 
I'm sure there are some applications out there which can make use of it all. For games, though, you have to figure that 99.9% of people have 1-4GB, so game devs opt for low res textures which won't use up more vram than what the average person has.

3-4GB is the sweet spot right now and will be for some time to come, IMO.
 
A video card with 12 GiB of DDR5 memory -- hard to wrap my mind around that concept. It's too bad they can't use the vast quantities of unused video RAM for something else when not gaming. Maybe a disk cache?
When we see 12GB cards hit the market, we can worry about how to use the 'vast quantities' of extra. Truth be told, if you are an educated consumer, you shouldn't be buying a 12GB card unless you are using it (meaning 3x 4K monitors). Now there will always be people that will buy blind ("zOMG 12GB it HAS to be better than 4GB!"), we see it multiple times daily here in fact, but you can't code for stupidity either.
 
I bet it all goes unused when its powered off... Im not getting your point with that. You want something to use it, but when you game you have to shut it off before starting the game...sounds like a PITA unless they can do it automatically...

Not to mention there is already technology called a RAMDISK, which uses your system ram...
 
And most people with a 780 will have an SSD.
What good would 2GB of cache be? None.

What good would 2GiB of cache be? Well, I could use it to completely cache/store
an oracle or MySQL DB (all the oracle or MySQL DB's I've worked on
could individually completely fit in 2 GiB), which would make inserts, sorts and
joined table searches ultra-fast. I could use it to cache recently viewed
webpages.

Gee isn't the memory on a video card much, much, much faster than DDR3 system memory, not to mention SSD's?
 
And what happens to your Oracle or MySQL Database when a game loads into the vRAM?
 
And what happens to your Oracle or MySQL Database when a game loads into the vRAM?

OK, I won't use the engine=memory for my table types, but I could use the VRAM for DB caching or temporary tables for stored procedures. I do have DB's that have the engine=memory table type. When the web portal webpage loads, it checks to see if the engine=memory table is empty or not and loads (via load data infile) if it's empty.

My 2 GiB 6970 is probably going to end up in my Linux box, which means the majority of VRAM will always
be wasted since I don't game on it. But a GiB of high speed VRAM would definitely be useful for some of the large engine=memory temporary tables I create from my stored procedures.

2 GiB of high speed VRAM might even be useful for web servers.
 
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