Chalnoth said:
DaveBaumann said:
I suspect that 512MB cards will be in the high end minority for a fair while as well!
Memory sizes tend to filter down to low-end parts more quickly than anything else in the high-end space, since there's still this perception that the amount of memory a video card has is the primary determination of performance.
Actually, memory sizes do not seem to "trickle down". 256MB was first present on ultra-high-end cards, and interestingly, low-end cards followed quickly. That's actually still the case today, mid-end cards still only have 128MB (things like 6600GT, X700XT).
The reason is that fast fbga memory is expensive, and large capacities aren't really available (the first 256mbit fbga chips for graphic cards were actually dual-die 2x128mbit chips, don't know if that's still the case). So it actually costs a significant amount of money to have large memory sizes on high-end cards (might also make board layout more difficult if more chips are needed).
Compare that to the low-end boards: they use ordinary, slow tsop memory. The cheapest ($/MB) you can get there is 256mbit chips (nowadays, all 256MB and 512MB pc dimms use them). And for a 128bit mem-bus board you need 8 chips anyway, and so the cost increase of using 8 256mbit instead of 8 128mbit chips is fairly minimal. Only ultra-low-end cards need only 4 chips (64bit memory interface).
Unless someone starts producing 512mbit gddr3 memory (actually, since fbga chips are 32bit wide, manufacturers would prefer 1gbit chips so they'd need only 4 chips for 512MB 128bit cards) I would not expect 512MB memory size to trickle down. Low-end (or "low-mid-end" like 6600) cards might get 512MB though fairly soon (since 512mbit tsop ddr/ddr2 chips are already readily available at decent prices) - not that it would make sense, but uninformed people might prefer a 512MB 6200 to a 128MB 6600GT
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