When it comes down to squeezing a bit of extra performance form graphics cards, one of the simplest tricks that manufacturers resort to is to add some extra memory, Inno3D being the latest to resort to this solution for some of their GeForce 400 series video cards.
As a result, three new video cards are born, namely the GTX 460, GTS 450 and the
GT 430 2GB, all of them coming with more graphics memory compared to their regular versions.
“DX11 and Win7 are becoming more compute-intensive, whether it be for AA, Tessellation or for things like CUDA/PhysX and DirectCompute,” states the company in its press release.
“You also have programmes such as Adobe and AutoDesk that tie-in to GPGPU, or video transcoders who use it to reduce conversion times.
The amount of textures and shaders, etc. is what consume the vast majority of the GPU memory and those are screen resolution independent,” concludes
Inno3D.
Although I can certainly see how would the
GTX 460 benefit from the added memory, it is very unlikely that the GT 430 or even the GTS 450 would see a bump in performance from the added memory amount since these cards will most surely have problems supporting the kind of resolutions that require the extra memory.
As far as GPU computing is concerned, this does indeed benefit from large memory frame buffers, but this is usually the case when double precision or other advanced calculations are performed, Nvidia limiting the power of the cores used in these three cards when it comes to GPGPU so I doubt users will see a speed increase in this sort of applications.
Finally, I would have to say that it all comes down to price. If Inno3D will manage to price these aggressively enough there will be a market for them.
However, if they fails to do so these will only appeal to users that are easily impressed by marketing talk.
Find us on Google+
