Since DDR3 sure doesn't do much but drain wallets and create one heck of a lot of overvolting to get high clock speeds(and still lousy timings).

And then it never hurts that video cards get a whole new generation of memory.

Does this put the nail in the coffin for that newer RAMBUS style memory?

Stop rambling about RAMBUS and crap.

P.S. Nice to see technology evolves.

I know ddr3 is supposed to be the next big memory type but I think ddr2 is still here to stay for a bit. how is dd3 dominant in anyway?

Brian, GDDR n= DDR

I believe GDDR and DDR are quite separate markets with only loose technological tie-ins to each other. Sure, DDR3 is so far a bad move; but we've been using GDDR3 to great success since the nVidia 6800 series, and the ATI X800 series back from 2004. GDDR3 has served us well so far.

Of course I'm looking forward to GDDR5, and GDDR4 in the mainstream perhaps too. But it did take the industry a good five years from the introduction of DDR to move to GDDR3, the next big step. At that rate, my guess puts GDDR5 around 2010 time-frame for wide-spread adoption.

This is of course if the industry doesn't just stick with GDDR3 but with ever-increasing bus widths. 2002 saw the introduction of a 256-bit memory bus on the Radeon 9700 Pro. 2006 was the first step up from that with the Geforce 8800GTX.

There is a set of wiki pages that explains the specifics of each type of RAM, (including RamBus, SDRAM, and older types).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDDR3

Here's the short version:
Type = maximum transfers per memory clock cycle.
SDRAM = 1
DDR = 2
DDR2 = 4
DDR3 = 8

Latency tends to increase with each faster type, negating some of the performance advantage. Voltage generally decreases (and memory core clock may decrease) which leads to lower power usage and heat generation. However, if the memory core clock is the same (i.e. DDR2-667 vs DDR3-1333), then the latency is similar giving the performance and power advantage to the newer version (i.e. DDR3).

GDDRx uses similar technology to DDR(x-1), that is, GDDR2 is similar to DDR, GDDR3 is similar to DDR2, GDDR4 is similar to DDR3, etc., but it's optimized for graphics use.

... There are only 3(I think) cards that even use GDDR4 and are all from ATI. The 1950XTX 1GB is GDDR4 and the HD2900Pro/XT 1GB is GDDR4.I haven't seen any reviews on the cards running GDDR4 but they seem to be able to clock better and faster and probably better potential in OC'ing. I haven't tested my 2900Pro 1GB yet but its hard to find a 6pin to 8 pin converter.

Also Conor, NVidia did release the highest bus width(384bit) until the HD2900 which has a 512bit bus and according to the ATI website, their FireGL series is 1024bit bus width. I would love to have that for a memory bus. I wounder if GDDR5 will incorporate that.

And a last note, DD3 may not seem like a good choice now but it was the same with DDR and DDR2. I bought 2 gigs of DDR 800 about 3-4 years ago and all together it was about $400 dollars. And until recently DDR2 was the same and when it came out the timings seemed too high but DDR2 proved to be much faster than DDR and I am sure DDR3 will as well with time and maturity.

be somehow more like ddr3.5 then? just an optimised gddr4? ohwell im not going to complain if gddr5 is somehow cheaper then gddr4 and more powerful at lower energy. optimisations ftw?