GDDR3 - Commercial Implementation

Commercial Implementation

Despite being designed by ATI, the first card to use the technology was nVidia's GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in early 2004, where it replaced the GDDR2 chips used up to that time. The next card to use GDDR3 was nVidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra, where it was key in maintaining reasonable power requirements compared to the card's predecessor, the GeForce 5950 Ultra. ATI began using the memory on its Radeon X800 cards. GDDR3 was Sony's choice for the PlayStation 3 gaming console's graphics memory, although its nVidia based GPU is also capable of accessing the main system memory, which consists of XDR DRAM designed by Rambus Incorporated (Similar technology is marketed by nVidia as TurboCache in PC platform GPUs). Microsoft's Xbox 360 is shipped with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, and is helping to pioneer the use of this memory as standard system memory rather than only video memory. Nintendo's Wii also contains 64 MB of GDDR3 memory.