Hacker News Reader

Comment by superrad | Hacker News Reader

Is there any point (for games) in having that much memory when you can really only address about 9 GB a frame at 60Hz (Titan Xp is 550GB/s)?

I mean its certainly better than the Titan X (Maxwell) which could only address less than half it's memory while running at 60Hz.

It just seems like an effort to inflate the price of the product without adding much value.

View on HN

Sorry I might not understand what you are saying.

You're in the game and look at a house, then you turn around an look at a tree, so you need the geometry and texture of the tree, but no longer of the house. Then you look down and a chicken walks into frame, so you now need that, you kill the chicken and suddenly need the dying chicken animation etc.

Almost never you need all data for a single frame. That would be way too much work for the render pipeline anyway.

He is saying a video game running at 60 Hz has approx 16 ms per frame. 550 GB/s * 16 ms ~ 9 GB. So if you are running full bandwidth for an entire frame you can access 9 GB of RAM.

What the responder was getting at is that despite being able to access only 9GB per frame, it may still be useful to keep more than 9GB of data in there for other purposes, say if you have data that isn't being read/written every frame but is still used for rendering. So it doesn't necessarily follow that memory beyond that which can be addressed per frame is useless.

The Titan X was never intended exclusively for gamers. Do not forget that Nvidia is also emphasizing its AI-related products.

This. The Titan-line makes more sense if, in addition to viewing it as the top end of their gaming line, you view it as the bottom-end(ish) of their compute line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com