Summary
Let’s interpret the collected results in modern times: You want to buy a Geforce RTX 4080 and suddenly a variant with 32GB of graphics memory appears in the price comparison. Great, enough VRam for the next three generations of AAA titles! What is ultimately offered in terms of raw performance is at best equivalent to an RTX 4060 TI and the large graphics memory is boring because it is almost never used. What would quickly grow into a major shitstorm nowadays went almost unnoticed under the radar 20 years ago – often thanks to a lack of specialist knowledge on the part of buyers, as well as the low internet penetration. As a collector of retro graphics cards, I regularly stumble across such neutered Radeon 9800 models – so the market and distribution of the cards seems to have been quite large. The Geforce 6800 cheat packs, on the other hand, don’t appear so often in the second-hand markets.
And let’s be honest: Graphics card cheat packs, especially with models like the GeForce 6800 and the Radeon 9800 Pro, are a really interesting topic in the history of graphics cards, because this story keeps repeating itself. Both cards intentionally used reduced memory bandwidth in certain versions even though they were equipped with expanded memory, which couldn’t help but cause confusion for consumers.
Let’s summarize this again briefly. A case study was and is the NVIDIA GeForce 6800, which was equipped with a 256-bit memory interface, but was simply reduced to a 128-bit interface in cheaper models. This meant that the extended 256 MB memory could not be used efficiently, as the reduced bandwidth significantly impaired the performance of the memory. However, NVIDIA still promoted these models heavily, giving some buyers the impression that they were getting the full performance that the expanded memory could theoretically offer. In fact, benchmarks showed that the reduced bandwidth significantly slowed down performance in memory-intensive games and applications. It is rumored that Jensen was able to lay the foundations for his leather jacket collection from the surplus.
It was a similar story with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, which was available in certain versions with 128 MB or 256 MB memory. Despite the double memory capacity of the 256 MB version, there were no significant performance gains as the memory interface was also reduced. The full capacity of the memory could not be used, which was particularly noticeable in games with higher resolutions and graphics settings, but this did not save ATI.
This phenomenon was typical at the time, when graphics card manufacturers began to bring different versions of the same model onto the market. These “cut-down” versions, sold with reduced technical specifications but similar-sounding names to the more expensive models, often caused confusion and dissatisfaction among buyers when the actual performance fell short of expectations.
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