Readers on their toes will be aware that at the time of writing, the only graphics card to sport GDDR4 memory is ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX. Its 64GB/s of memory bandwidth helped it perform favourably in our tests. However, a whole new wave of cards with GDDR4 support are around the corner, from both NVIDIA and ATI. Even better news can be found in reports that GDDR4 yields are pretty damn good.
ATI's X1950 XTX's GDDR4 is clocked to 1GHz (2GHz effective). The Inquirer has learned that yields for Samsung's GDDR4 parts at 1GHz is "almost perfect", while word that "yields of higher clocked parts are good as well" tops the cake with a nice moist icing. That means cheap parts, which could well lead to refreshed cards with greater performance at little or no extra cost. Huzzah!
Of course, it'd be rude of us not to ask the question: "If 1GHz yields are almost perfect, then how does that set things up for the overclockers?" We'd imagine rather well, and the good yields also mean that we can expect increasing stock clock speeds, GDDR4's clock having more than doubled come this time next year, so say The Inq.
With some hilariously fat memory bandwidth finding its way onto new graphics boards, we'll all be struggling to remember what life was like when we couldn't game at HD resolutions and with AA cranked up nice and high...
