8GB Sapphire Radeon R9 290X TOXIC
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V@IO
I agree with Hilbert, 8GB is total overkill ATM, this is nothing more than a marketing stunt IMHO.
LoccOtHaN
Maby is not only marketing ;-) look ahead and see the 4k Gaming and CF ;-) gRAM always welcome ! GL Sapphire
Cryio
This is future proofing right here, seeing how 3 GB of VRAM is becoming normal for 1080p, 4xAA and High-Rez textures.
Koniakki
2 of these in CF and 4K gaming and it will make a bit more sense.
But again, 8GB of vram... HOLY VRAM! 😛
drbaltazar
With h265 just around the corner !unless application plan to real time more?sapphire might need to give an example where this is useful (probably some form of bitcoint mining?)4gb was the sweat spot because file size system of window is 4gb .but this 8gb?I can't see its use ,it isnt ram ,so like most say it would be slow when used as a ram replacement !
Macethy
That is A LOT of VRAM!
Two of these in Crossfire would be crazy, would love to know how you could max out the memory. Maybe at 4k or higher?
(.)(.)
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.
zxays
David3k
I seem to recall back in the day stuff being said along the lines of "512MB VRAM is too much, nothing needs that much" and various tunes to that same sound.
It's called progress, we should just take it in stride.
This is a sensible decision, if the memory frequency and timings aren't too impacted by cramming more of it on.
I wonder how similar the reaction will be once 32GB vram cards hit the market?
David3k
Xenotone
It's not future proofing because by the time you need 8gb of vram this card will be old and slow and sad and it will have no friends.
David3k
southamptonfc
I imagine they think there is a market for people who want to run 4K in cross/trifire.
The architecture probably only (easily) allows doubling up of the VRAM, hence 8GB.
schmidtbag
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.
But anyway I think a GPU like this would actually appeal to some gamers. Some people who buy a GPU like this don't intend to upgrade for a very long time, so this model could still play games reasonably well for as much as 5 years in the future, assuming your display doesn't change and your CPU is good enough. Another appealing aspect about this is it won't be appealing to bitcoin and litecoin miners. I get the impression you really don't need much VRAM at all for mining so I don't think these people are going to want to spend that much extra for hardware they can't even take advantage of.
FortAwesome
The only case I can come-up with is Battlefield 4. When using the Mantle Renderer, it uses so much VRAM that you can't really use the Resolution scale past 100%. If I set it to 150% it will be really choppy but not because the card can't take it: It just runs out of VRAM.
Like I said, 1 case 😛
Stukov
holler
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates
here's to the fake quote of the day 😛c1:
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
The Mac
The Mac