500MB+ of textures!

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ewilson248

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I was just looking over an article about D3: on tom's can you say "lots of textures" ?

ultra / max quality = 512MB video cards
high = 256
medium= 128
low=64

I thought my 5950 ultra would cut it, now I am not so sure.

how much is a 512Mb card going to cost anyway, $1,000???

SLI suddenly seems like a REAL good idea!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
bring it on!
 
We've known about this for quite some time now. I think 512 cards will be coming out later this year but I'm going to wait a year or so before I actually get a new card. Until then I think I'm just gonna run Doom 3 on high quality, which I'm sure still looks stunning.
 
must have missed that! I asked a question about how much memory on graphics cards a while back, most posts said that 256 would be enough, now it seems that may not be 100% true.
 
ohh boy Im not gettin doom 3 anymore I only have a 128 mb card pfft
And i heard that some 128 mb cards are better than 256 cards
 
Ok, let's say you got an overall great computer with a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, so you can only play at medium details at good fps, but if you got a 256MB you suddenly can play at high details. I though there wasn't that big a difference between the 9800 PRO 128 and 256MB (I still got the 256).
 
sHm0zY said:
ohh boy Im not gettin doom 3 anymore I only have a 128 mb card pfft
And i heard that some 128 mb cards are better than 256 cards
Click to expand...

Wow such an intelligent post! :rolleyes:
 
I dont care, I still say my 128 mb radeon 9800 pro will still be able to perfrom on high settings, the only thing we can do now is just wait and see
 
Don't know, I hope my 9800 PRO 256 can pull of High and 1024, otherwise I should have simply gone for the 128 and played everything at medium and saved me some money. Plus I do agree let's wait and they bitch about the horrific system requirements.
 
I think this also depends on you idea of: max / high / medium / low !

what the D3 guys think is "medium" may be what we USED to think was "high"!

I know for me, "medium" in farcry looked pretty damn good to my eye!
 
True, but than again Very High all the way looked beyond amazing and once you get used to that, it's alwasy harder to go down (damn the game industry, they get you addicted to high settings and then, AHHHHHH).
 
Heh well then again, didn't someone say that Medium on D3 would look better than what hihg did in Far Cry?
 
thats bull, lots of 128 mb cards will outperform 256 mb cards. This info isnt true in all situations.
 
The Terminator said:
thats bull, lots of 128 mb cards will outperform 256 mb cards. This info isnt true in all situations.
Click to expand...


Ultra high/high/med/low refer to the texture details. In ultra high quality, no texture is compressed. In high, only specular and diffuse are compressed. Medium compresses normal maps, specular, and diffuse are compressed. In low, everything is compressed.

The reason behind this is the 286, 128 mb and 64mb cards dont have enough memmory for the larger uncompressed textures.

Read more: http://www.webdog.org/plans/313/
 
I dont see what your saying? Are you saying that all 256 mb cards will out perform the 128 mb ones? If you are, I bet your wrong.
 
What I am saying is that it is not possible for 128 meg cards to have as high a texture detail as 256 meg cards (because 256 meg cards can hold double the textures). If anything, the 128 meg cards will probably outperform the 256 ones because they have a few extra compressed textures which is less taxing on the graphics card!
 
OK man, you choose the settings in game, your video card doesnt dictate what texture resolution you use. You can run high detail with a 128 meg card.
 
If you have enough video memory you can store all of the textures in it so that you have extremely fast access to them. If there are more textures than you can fit into the video memory your computer will be forced to keep constantly swapping textures that aren't being used for ones that are needed but are currently stored in your RAM. If you don't have enough system RAM to hold the textures they will have to be loaded from your slow hard drive. You don't want that.

More textures than video memory = Bad
 
Well unless you have a 512 card, which no one does, you won't be running Doom 3 to its fullest potential. That doesn't matter though because on High graphics it'll still be more than enough for me. Medium graphics are going to look damn good too. It's not like High graphics are superb but when you go to medium it looks like quake 1. People are stressing out about nothing.
 
OCybrManO said:
If you have enough video memory you can store all of the textures in it so that you have extremely fast access to them. If there are more textures than you can fit into the video memory your computer will be forced to keep constantly swapping textures that aren't being used for ones that are needed but are currently stored in your RAM. If you don't have enough system RAM to hold the textures they will have to be loaded from your slow hard drive. You don't want that.

More textures than video memory = Bad
Click to expand...

It would be an even worse case scenario if video memory + system memory < Texture size. Loading textures in realtime from you swap file = :eek:
 
There is very, very little difference between high and ultra settings. You probably won't even notice.
 
Meh, all I care is that Doom 3 is coming out; I payed a little bit extra for that 256MB and I hope it pays out, but in the end I don't care about Doom 3 in the slightest, it's half life 2 where I will be bitching if my 256 doesn't pay out :)
 
KagePrototype said:
There is very, very little difference between high and ultra settings. You probably won't even notice.
Click to expand...

well i haven't seen any screenshots side by side to prove its a small difference yet.
 
poseyjmac said:
well i haven't seen any screenshots side by side to prove its a small difference yet.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

http://www.webdog.org/plans/313/


:cheers:
 
It is not just about how much video memory you have, it is about the graphics card. Having a 256 MB FX 5200 video card because that won't do you any good. You must have a card powerful enough to use that 256 MB of video memory. In my opinion, the X800/6800 series are the first ones powerful enough to use 256 MB of video memory. It was known that the 256 MB cards released last year were a pure marketing ploy used by Nvidia. ATI soon followed suit with their 256 MB cards. I wouldn't be surprised if ATI or Nvidia came out with a 512 MB card within the next several months before the mid-year refresh.

As for detail levels. Medium = Far Cry very high settings. High = better than Far Cry graphics. Ultra High = Much better than Far Cry graphics. From my understanding, the ultra high settings not only uses more Video Ram but it may also use new graphical features like better shaders or normal maps.
 
blahblahblah said:
It is not just about how much video memory you have, it is about the graphics card. Having a 256 MB FX 5200 video card because that won't do you any good. You must have a card powerful enough to use that 256 MB of video memory. In my opinion, the X800/6800 series are the first ones powerful enough to use 256 MB of video memory. It was known that the 256 MB cards released last year were a pure marketing ploy used by Nvidia. ATI soon followed suit with their 256 MB cards. I wouldn't be surprised if ATI or Nvidia came out with a 512 MB card within the next several months before the mid-year refresh.
Click to expand...


Basically what I was going to say after readind through this thread :cheers:


....and 100% correct.


Your FX5200 256 will not run at high settings folks.
 
Pressure said:
But the FX5200 is so leet.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's the best card if you pant a piece of sh*t that can't even run the good games on low settings.


For the slower people, hold CTRL+A to see all of my post.
 
You all should really look at this.

"We did not test the 9700, but we did test 9500, 9600 and 9800 so I know where your card is going to land.

Your best playable settings are likely going to be Medium Quality at 800x600 with all advanced options turned on. These settings would be VERY SMOOTH in terms of framerate. In fact, it is going to be downright fast. Just use the “com_showfps 1” command at the DOOM 3 console to bring up your framerate counter to watch it.

I would expect that with the 9700 you have a very good chance at playing DOOM 3 at High Quality 1024x768 and still having solid performance with all the eye candy turned on. I don’t know how important high frame rate is to you, but I am going to guess this is where you will be most comfortable playing.

We found that extra memory (above 512MB) on the motherboard did allow for some smoother transitions where textures need to be loaded. You could even turn on Ultra quality to give it a look buy I think the system hitching from loads would be unbearable in the game.

That said, DOOM 3 is VERY forgiving in terms of resolution. 640 looks like 1024 and 1024 looks like 1600 in terms of what we are used to in 3D gaming, or at least that is what I felt. Also, we found that most of the time, forgoing AA would allow us to keep a level of resolution above what we would get with AA turned on. So we opted for higher resolution without AA in almost all of our tests besides the very high-end systems.

I hope that helps you out Dig. Let me know if we got close to being right. The cookies rock, thanks again.

EDIT: Let me add that moving to High Quality Textures turns on 8XAF as well. So that may be a bit more than the 9700 can bear. A 9800Pro did High Quality at 1024x768 with no problems on a 3200+. 9500Pro did 800x600 at Medium. So you will be in the middle somewhere."
 
I can guarantee you all that a 9800 card with 128 mb of ram will run the high detail mode very well, if you have a reasonable system to boot (no pun intended).
 
id say a 9800 pro/xt would run high settings very well. Depends on your personal definition of "very well".
 
im not sacrifising myself or my money for doom3.
 
DiSTuRbEd said:
Wow such an intelligent post! :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

lol, did you really expect better out of him?

Anyways, the screenshots in that doom3 hardware guide of the comparison between high and ultra settings really wasn't all that different (or at least different enough to warrent spending a butt ton of cash on the top of the line gfx card when they come out), so I think the 512mb cards will pretty much be unnecessary overkill until they become affordable.
 
posey, go to hardocp.com and look at the screenshots. There is virtually no diff between High and Ultra settings. Seems like they just included Ultra because they could.
 
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