8GB Sapphire Radeon R9 290X TOXIC

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/13/2014 08:22 AM | source: | 43 comment(s)

Though I have no idea why any gamer should ever need it, Sapphire is stirring the marketing buzz a bit more by announcing a 8GB Radeon R9 290X, it will be a VaporX or Toxic edition. The presumably Toxic Edition ships with an orange accented cooler. Both of these cards will be limited edition and pricing has yet to be confirmed by Sapphire.

Currently there is no word on the clock frequencies whatsoever, but expect a 1050 MHz'ish clock frequency. Anyway below the photo's, courtesy of kitguru.

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Stukov
Senior Member

Posts: 4899
Joined: 2007-10-01

#4781866 Posted on: 03/13/2014 07:30 PM

Remember people, crossfiring doesn't actually double your VRAM. In theory, it does, but during gameplay both GPUs share almost entirely the same data, with some minor differences here and there. I would sincerely love to be proven wrong about this.

With all types of rendering used by Radeon cards it will never double and always be the same. So not even in theory.

holler
Senior Member

Posts: 221
Joined: 2003-07-07

#4781870 Posted on: 03/13/2014 07:34 PM

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates

here's to the fake quote of the day :pc1:

I can see the whole 8GB used on high rez surround setups easily, so just because you don't need it doesn't mean some other people can't make use of it.
Always good to have options...

schmidtbag
Senior Member

Posts: 5755
Joined: 2012-11-10

#4781873 Posted on: 03/13/2014 07:35 PM

With all types of rendering used by Radeon cards it will never double and always be the same. So not even in theory.

Well the reason it works in theory is because if you use the 2nd GPU to render something different, then the memory mapping can change. For example, in a game involving portals, one GPU could be used to render the room you're in but the 2nd GPU could be used to render the room inside the portal. This isn't how it actually works, but it COULD be coded to work that way. This is why I'm fond of things like physx, because a GPU dedicated to physx has a completely different set of tasks and therefore no redundancy (waste) in memory.

The Mac
Senior Member

Posts: 4404
Joined: 2011-08-24

#4781893 Posted on: 03/13/2014 08:14 PM

With all types of rendering used by Radeon cards it will never double and always be the same. So not even in theory.

While this is true in AFR, mantle is intrucing asynchronous memory management, which will allow access to the full memory.

The Mac
Senior Member

Posts: 4404
Joined: 2011-08-24

#4781895 Posted on: 03/13/2014 08:16 PM

Going by whats out there at the moment, visually that is, there shouldnt be any need for anything above 3gb at say 1600p, any higher at that res and its just lazy dev work.

imo.

AA requires massive amounts of ram.

if you are going to xfire this puppy, you will be cranking up the AA requireing more memory.

Paritucualrily 8x-16xAA at 4K

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