• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Doom3 Can Use 512MB of Video Ram!

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

OC-Master

Member
Joined
Jul 14, 2001
Location
Edmonton, Alberta
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17437

Guess it will still be some time before ATI and nVidia use Samsung GDDR3 memory on there graphics cards. The new memory supports 256bit and 512-bit pass and runs at 1.2GHz and 1.6GHz respectively.

http://www.3dlabs.com/products/product.asp?prod=293&page=6

The WildCat Realizm is currently the only graphics card out there that uses 1.6GHz 512-bit 512MB graphics memory.

I suspect that in three years from now, all cards will come standard with this memory. I guess we gotta wait to see the full potential of Doom3's visuals LOL


OC-Master
 
yeah this is pretty old news, if oyu look through some of the other threads you'll some stuff about it.
 
heyheyhey said:
And again, 2 256MB cards in SLI DOES NOT equal one 512MB card.

As said above, using 2 256MB cards will not compensate for lack of a single card utilizing 512MB of VRAM.
Using 2 cards together can only help split the tasks being processed b the video card between the two. I will not double our memory.

OverClocking your card(s) will not compensate either for lack of 512MB of VRAM. I highl doubt anyone here can OC their VCard to 512 speeds w/o damaging it (not that I am doubting anyody).
 
As far as DoomIII requiring a 512MB Video Card, that is to play the game in ULTRA QUALITY mode. The 512MB VCARD nessecity is to achieve the maximum visual 3D texture and visualization of games engine with good performance.

If requested I can supply more information just let me know.
 
So what kind of video hardware do you think Id had to test the game out on? Might seem like a dumb question, but how did they run it at 60 fps on ultra mode for the tests if no 512 MB video cards exist?
 
DMac said:
So what kind of video hardware do you think Id had to test the game out on? Might seem like a dumb question, but how did they run it at 60 fps on ultra mode for the tests if no 512 MB video cards exist?

If they tested them on 512MB cards it may be possible that they acquired prototype and/or pre-production cards from nVidia and/or ATi.

Either that or they are speculating that due to the amount of textures/etc in the game then only a 512MB card will have sufficient memory to cope with the game in full eye-candy mode.
 
David said:
If they tested them on 512MB cards it may be possible that they acquired prototype and/or pre-production cards from nVidia and/or ATi.

Either that or they are speculating that due to the amount of textures/etc in the game then only a 512MB card will have sufficient memory to cope with the game in full eye-candy mode.

Would have to be one or the other I guess. The one article said that ultra quality could load as much as 500 MB into memory so they were probably just speculating.
 
David said:
If they tested them on 512MB cards it may be possible that they acquired prototype and/or pre-production cards from nVidia and/or ATi.

Either that or they are speculating that due to the amount of textures/etc in the game then only a 512MB card will have sufficient memory to cope with the game in full eye-candy mode.

Kyle said that they couldn't get a 512mb card from nVidia at this time...at beyoun3d.
sorry for no linky.

yet here is one of the latest plan updates:

http://www.shacknews.com/finger/[email protected]

mica
 
nafdaos said:
OverClocking your card(s) will not compensate either for lack of 512MB of VRAM. I highl doubt anyone here can OC their VCard to 512 speeds w/o damaging it (not that I am doubting anyody).

512 is not the speed, but the size or amount of vid memory a card can store.
sooo, OCing the speed of the vid memory, has nothing to do with how much texture information it can hold.....;)

just a heads up, NeFiewDAOS.

mica
 
Here's a more complete summary of the video memory requirements (from Tom's):

id Software's programmer Robert Duffy updated his .plan file and among other things, he explains the graphics requirements for the upcoming game Doom III.

In short, here's which requirements are needed for the different quality setups of the game:

Ultra Quality (max. quality): for 512MB video cards. Each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression.

High Quality: for 256MB video cards. Uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss.

Medium Quality: for 128MB video cards. Uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges.

Low Quality: for 64MB video cards. It does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well.

Roberts explanation on video card requirements, taken from the .plan file:

Image fidelity is dependent on what quality level we load the textures at.

In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic :) and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.

High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.

Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.

Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.

One thing of note on the normal map compression is that generally speaking if you DXT a normal map you get really crappy results. NVIDIA hardware supports palettized compression which yields good compression and normal maps retain hard and round edges really well. Unfortunately this compression does a poor job in other cases and you end up getting splotchy areas. ATI does not support the palettized compression so we needed a better solution. ATI had done some research on various methods of normal map compression and we ended swapping the red and alpha ( which is zero in the case of a normal map ) channels. This effectively allows the compression to do a much better job and is just one extra instruction in the fragment program to move the alpha channel into the red channel. The bottom line on what happens on each card is as follows.

All modern NVIDIA and all ATI hardware use the compressed normal maps in Medium and Low qualities with the swizzled components.
NV10/20 hardware ( GF4MX and GF3 ) uses palettized normal maps in Medium and Low qualities.

Another question I have had multiple emails about, yes the game is capped at 60fps for normal game play. For render demos we run those at full tilt which is why you will see > 60fps.
 
nafdaos said:
As said above, using 2 256MB cards will not compensate for lack of a single card utilizing 512MB of VRAM. Using 2 cards together can only help split the tasks being processed b the video card between the two. I will not double our memory.

OverClocking your card(s) will not compensate either for lack of 512MB of VRAM. I highl doubt anyone here can OC their VCard to 512 speeds w/o damaging it (not that I am doubting anyody).

It was my understanding that SLI splits the screen in two. One card does the top and the other the bottom. So if the game can use 512MB of VRAM. And you have two 256MB cards. If one card is only doing half the screen shouldn’t it only need half the memory? So the two 256MB cards in effect are the same as one 512MB card.
 
oh yes there are 512mb cards, a friend of mine works with one at his work, they have about 5 computers that have that size cards, they are for doing CGI movie making.
 
shard said:
oh yes there are 512mb cards, a friend of mine works with one at his work, they have about 5 computers that have that size cards, they are for doing CGI movie making.

Those cards will be CAD cards though, just have a look at the 3d labs line up of cards - the wildcat series. They are good for CAD but not games.
 
Well if someone was crazy enough could they buy one of those wildcat 512mb cards and flash the bios with a modified bios? I would never do this because I could build another bery nice computer for the cost of that card, but I have seen some people with deep pockets who paid 1200 for there 6800Ultras. I know the wildcat is for cad, but could a bios update with the right drivers make its gaming performance improve?
 
cruc1fy said:
Another question I have had multiple emails about, yes the game is capped at 60fps for normal game play. For render demos we run those at full tilt which is why you will see > 60fps.

60fps cap? Why on earth would that be acceptable? I certainly hope the very first patch will eliminate that limitation. It's rediculous.
 
Back