How much details and far can I go with a Radeon 9800 Pro. with 128 MB?

[ANTant]

I was just reading
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33751308 thread
about playing UT2K4 with a very high details you'll need a 256MB VGA
card!

Can someone please kindly explain how the math work for combinations
of video settings and resolutions? How high and far can I go with my
ATI Radeon Pro AIW with 128 MB of RAM? I mostly use 1152x864
resolution, 32-bit, anisotropic at 16X (max), 2x FSAA, quality, and
many other stuff I like to max out. If there is not enough video
memory, what happens? Does the game start using HDD, get choppy, etc.?
If not, then what types of symptoms show up (e.g., graphic
corruptions)?

Is there an utility to watch/log how much video memory is being used
in the video card? My system configuration can be found here:
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt ...

Thank you in advance.
--
"You'd think we could just attract ants like normal people."
--Wolverine (X-Men:TAS)
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Phillip Pi (Ant) @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup/mailing
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[Nikolaos Tampakis]

I was just reading
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33751308 thread
about playing UT2K4 with a very high details you'll need a 256MB VGA
card!

Can someone please kindly explain how the math work for combinations
of video settings and resolutions? How high and far can I go with my
ATI Radeon Pro AIW with 128 MB of RAM? I mostly use 1152x864
resolution, 32-bit, anisotropic at 16X (max), 2x FSAA, quality, and
many other stuff I like to max out. If there is not enough video
memory, what happens? Does the game start using HDD, get choppy, etc.?
If not, then what types of symptoms show up (e.g., graphic
corruptions)?

Is there an utility to watch/log how much video memory is being used
in the video card? My system configuration can be found here:
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt ...

Thank you in advance.

At 32 bit per pixel you have 4 bytes per pixel... and at 1152 x 864 you
have 995328 pixels, therefore you need exactly 4 x 995328 = 3981312
bytes or exactly 3,796875 megabytes. This is less than 4 megabytes, and
this is for the displayed frame buffer. If you want double buffering (a
driver might default to double buffering to enable smoother
scrolling/animation), double that amount. Also the driver might reserve
some video memory to cache non-displayed screen sections under windows.
Even so I doubt the total amount of all these would ever exceed 16
megabytes, which is just too little compared to even 128 megabytes.
So as you can see the rest of the video memory is useless for normal
windows operation and is there simply for the textures. I am not a gamer
to know exact details but it doesn't sound all that surprising that with
super-highly-detailed texturing, the requirements of a game would reach
256 megabytes.
When the onboard video memory is not sufficient the textures will be
stored in system RAM and swapped in and out of the onboard video memory
via AGP transfers, so AGP 8x might pay off a bit here.
But the reason 3d accelerator graphics adapters have such massive
amounts of onboard video memory is the inefficiency of the AGP bus when
it comes to texture transfers. So even though AGP 8x will be better than
4x, don't count too much on it, it's still way behind local onboard
video memory.
When AGP 1x/2x (rev. 1.0) came out we had the likes of Pentium II at
233-300 MHz, video RAM was rather expensive and the "gpu's" were more or
less in their early generations.
Today the average PC can easily have a P4 2,8 GHz (more than 10 times
the processing power), let's not even talk about how faster 3d
accelerators have gotten, yet the pump-through ability of AGP has only
increased 4 times. So it's no real substitute for onboard local video
memory and even if the game actually agrees to run with "only" 128 MB of
local video memory, if the real requirements are in the 256 MB range
performance will inevitably suffer. There won't be hard disk usage if
there are 128 MB of system RAM available for AGP texturing (this calls
for an equally large setting in the BIOS, of course), and with 1 GB of
RAM it is expected that you have 128 MB to spare, but I believe the
momentary pauses will be quite noticeable.

Regards
Nikos

 

[ANTant]

At 32 bit per pixel you have 4 bytes per pixel... and at 1152 x 864 you
have 995328 pixels, therefore you need exactly 4 x 995328 = 3981312
bytes or exactly 3,796875 megabytes. This is less than 4 megabytes, and
this is for the displayed frame buffer. If you want double buffering (a
driver might default to double buffering to enable smoother
scrolling/animation), double that amount. Also the driver might reserve
some video memory to cache non-displayed screen sections under windows.
Even so I doubt the total amount of all these would ever exceed 16
megabytes, which is just too little compared to even 128 megabytes.
So as you can see the rest of the video memory is useless for normal
windows operation and is there simply for the textures. I am not a gamer
to know exact details but it doesn't sound all that surprising that with
super-highly-detailed texturing, the requirements of a game would reach
256 megabytes.
When the onboard video memory is not sufficient the textures will be
stored in system RAM and swapped in and out of the onboard video memory
via AGP transfers, so AGP 8x might pay off a bit here.
But the reason 3d accelerator graphics adapters have such massive
amounts of onboard video memory is the inefficiency of the AGP bus when
it comes to texture transfers. So even though AGP 8x will be better than
4x, don't count too much on it, it's still way behind local onboard
video memory.
When AGP 1x/2x (rev. 1.0) came out we had the likes of Pentium II at
233-300 MHz, video RAM was rather expensive and the "gpu's" were more or
less in their early generations.
Today the average PC can easily have a P4 2,8 GHz (more than 10 times
the processing power), let's not even talk about how faster 3d
accelerators have gotten, yet the pump-through ability of AGP has only
increased 4 times. So it's no real substitute for onboard local video
memory and even if the game actually agrees to run with "only" 128 MB of
local video memory, if the real requirements are in the 256 MB range
performance will inevitably suffer. There won't be hard disk usage if
there are 128 MB of system RAM available for AGP texturing (this calls
for an equally large setting in the BIOS, of course), and with 1 GB of
RAM it is expected that you have 128 MB to spare, but I believe the
momentary pauses will be quite noticeable.

Regards
Nikos

Wow, Nikos. That was technical but interesting. Basically, I should be OK
on my system if I were to crank everything up like in Far Cry. I would
love to see a utility to monitor my video card memory usage.
--
"You'd think we could just attract ants like normal people."
--Wolverine (X-Men:TAS)
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Phillip Pi (Ant) @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup/mailing
( ) list.

 

[ANTant]

LOL. I just realized I posted this in the wrong newsgroup.

At 32 bit per pixel you have 4 bytes per pixel... and at 1152 x 864 you
have 995328 pixels, therefore you need exactly 4 x 995328 = 3981312
bytes or exactly 3,796875 megabytes. This is less than 4 megabytes, and
this is for the displayed frame buffer. If you want double buffering (a
driver might default to double buffering to enable smoother
scrolling/animation), double that amount. Also the driver might reserve
some video memory to cache non-displayed screen sections under windows.
Even so I doubt the total amount of all these would ever exceed 16
megabytes, which is just too little compared to even 128 megabytes.
So as you can see the rest of the video memory is useless for normal
windows operation and is there simply for the textures. I am not a gamer
to know exact details but it doesn't sound all that surprising that with
super-highly-detailed texturing, the requirements of a game would reach
256 megabytes.
When the onboard video memory is not sufficient the textures will be
stored in system RAM and swapped in and out of the onboard video memory
via AGP transfers, so AGP 8x might pay off a bit here.
But the reason 3d accelerator graphics adapters have such massive
amounts of onboard video memory is the inefficiency of the AGP bus when
it comes to texture transfers. So even though AGP 8x will be better than
4x, don't count too much on it, it's still way behind local onboard
video memory.
When AGP 1x/2x (rev. 1.0) came out we had the likes of Pentium II at
233-300 MHz, video RAM was rather expensive and the "gpu's" were more or
less in their early generations.
Today the average PC can easily have a P4 2,8 GHz (more than 10 times
the processing power), let's not even talk about how faster 3d
accelerators have gotten, yet the pump-through ability of AGP has only
increased 4 times. So it's no real substitute for onboard local video
memory and even if the game actually agrees to run with "only" 128 MB of
local video memory, if the real requirements are in the 256 MB range
performance will inevitably suffer. There won't be hard disk usage if
there are 128 MB of system RAM available for AGP texturing (this calls
for an equally large setting in the BIOS, of course), and with 1 GB of
RAM it is expected that you have 128 MB to spare, but I believe the
momentary pauses will be quite noticeable.

Regards
Nikos

--
"You'd think we could just attract ants like normal people."
--Wolverine (X-Men:TAS)
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Phillip Pi (Ant) @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup/mailing
( ) list.

 

[Roland Scheidegger]

At 32 bit per pixel you have 4 bytes per pixel... and at 1152 x 864 you
have 995328 pixels, therefore you need exactly 4 x 995328 = 3981312
bytes or exactly 3,796875 megabytes. This is less than 4 megabytes, and
this is for the displayed frame buffer. If you want double buffering (a
driver might default to double buffering to enable smoother
scrolling/animation), double that amount. Also the driver might reserve
some video memory to cache non-displayed screen sections under windows.
Even so I doubt the total amount of all these would ever exceed 16
megabytes, which is just too little compared to even 128 megabytes.

This is too simplistic. First, with 3d games, you NEED double-buffering
(or else triple-buffering). You also forgot to factor in the z-buffer
and the buffer increases with multisampling.
So, you have
1152x864 * 4 * 2 (back, z-buffer) * 2 (2x FSAA) +
1152x864 * 4 * 1 (front buffer).

That is 20MB - still not that much for a 128MB card, that still leaves
you 100MB or so for textures (some memory is also used for vertex
buffers, and new games could also need other buffers (multiple render
targets and such).

(and notice that the memory requirements grow quite fast with increased
AA level, at 1152x864 and 6x FSAA you'd already need 52MB just for the
front, back and z buffer.)

Roland

 

[Nikolaos Tampakis]

This is too simplistic. First, with 3d games, you NEED double-buffering
(or else triple-buffering). You also forgot to factor in the z-buffer
and the buffer increases with multisampling.
So, you have
1152x864 * 4 * 2 (back, z-buffer) * 2 (2x FSAA) +
1152x864 * 4 * 1 (front buffer).

That is 20MB - still not that much for a 128MB card, that still leaves
you 100MB or so for textures (some memory is also used for vertex
buffers, and new games could also need other buffers (multiple render
targets and such).

(and notice that the memory requirements grow quite fast with increased
AA level, at 1152x864 and 6x FSAA you'd already need 52MB just for the
front, back and z buffer.)

Roland

Thanks

Regards
Nikos