GeForce 9800 GX2.

[Rydian]

Article

For a high-end series 9 card, It'd better perform at least 30% faster than an 8800 Ultra.

Any guesses on the pricing and availability?

A gig of VRAM seems a bit much, though. I can bet most of the people buying cards with half a gig of VRAM, even, are playing games at 1024x768 and wasting money. o_<;

[Gil_Hamilton]

Article

For a high-end series 9 card, It'd better perform at least 30% faster than an 8800 Ultra.

Any guesses on the pricing and availability?

A gig of VRAM seems a bit much, though. I can bet most of the people buying cards with half a gig of VRAM, even, are playing games at 1024x768 and wasting money. o_<;

LCD has made higher resolution more desirable.

You only get a decent image at your LCD's native resolution, whereas the traditional CRT supports a wide variety of resolutions. So if you can't run your games at 1680*1050, or whatever, there's no point to the new enhanced shininess.




Having said that....
The graphics accelerator market is ENTIRELY out of control. When will the madness end?

[snkcube]

That thing is HUGE. It looks like it'll zap a lot of power.

Having said that....
The graphics accelerator market is ENTIRELY out of control. When will the madness end?

That is indeed true. Once you buy a video card, it'll be outdated pretty soon. And the good ones tend to put a dent in your pocket.

[Gil_Hamilton]

That thing is HUGE. It looks like it'll zap a lot of power.

Having said that....
The graphics accelerator market is ENTIRELY out of control. When will the madness end?

That is indeed true. Once you buy a video card, it'll be outdated pretty soon. And the good ones tend to put a dent in your pocket.

And the game market is encouraging it.

Look at Crysis. There's not a system in existence that can run it at playable frame rates with the detail level turned up all the way.
They have games on the shelves NOW for hardware that won't exist for another year.


On the upside, Crysis isn't selling too well. Maybe the gaming community is getting tired of this nonsense... or PC gaming is starting to die out under the incestual burden it's placed upon itself.

[Rydian]

Or maybe crysis is selling crappily because the only series of cards that can play it well at MEDIUM coast $200 and up?


Gil: Most LCD monitors' native resolutions aren't high enough to warrent half a gig of vram.

[Joe Camacho]

Any guesses on the pricing and availability?

ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

[Gil_Hamilton]

Or maybe crysis is selling crappily because the only series of cards that can play it well at MEDIUM coast $200 and up?


Gil: Most LCD monitors' native resolutions aren't high enough to warrent half a gig of vram.

Strictly speaking, that's true.

A 64 MB card is more than adequate for a 1680*1050*24-bit display.

But more detailed textures and larger numbers of textures and more complex character models are all more desirable at higher resolution. And since we've offloaded the task of image generation to the video card and taken it away from the CPU, that means the vidcard needs a lot more RAM.

[Clements]

Each GPU of a dual-GPU card (or Multi-GPUs) cannot access the memory that is tied to the other GPU. This means the 9800GX2 cannot take full advantage of 1GB of memory as a single GPU implementation would, and performance would be in line with a hypothetical equivalent card with half the memory.

[pagefault]

I would rather see the GPU specs than guess what it will be like with two GPUs, I read it would have eDRAM on it for free FSAA.

[Rydian]

Gil: Well, once you throw in high resolution textures (which of course people changing graphics settings have no idea what it means) and 8XAA, you can run into the 400MB range with some games. But msot keep it 100-200.


Pagefault: I'm assuming we have to wait until it's actually got ap roduct page on nvidia.com, you know?

[I.S.T.]

I would rather see the GPU specs than guess what it will be like with two GPUs, I read it would have eDRAM on it for free FSAA.

There's no way that's gonna happen... Beyond3d would have picked up on that...

[Gil_Hamilton]

Gil: Well, once you throw in high resolution textures (which of course people changing graphics settings have no idea what it means) and 8XAA, you can run into the 400MB range with some games. But msot keep it 100-200.

And since there's two separate GPUs, each with it's own RAM, we can divide a gigabyte by two to get 512 MB....

So your numbers make a gig of RAM for a dual-processor vidcard, or a half-gig for a single card, ENTIRELY reasonable.

[Rydian]

Yes, but not for playing sims 2 at 1024x768. XD

I'm saying not everybody needs that much, as older games usually only support 4x or 2x, and people don't generally run the highest resolution because they complain things are too small to see on their monitors.

So yes, it's good, but a lot of the time it's wasted power.

Unless you go with like a 3-screen setup.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Yes, but not for playing sims 2 at 1024x768. XD

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about a new LCD and a REAL game.
Who the hell would be using an old 1024*768 LCD, playing The Sims, and buying a dual-proc vidcard with a gig of RAM?

I'm saying not everybody needs that much, as older games usually only support 4x or 2x,

You don't buy top-end video cards for older games. You buy them for newer games.

and people don't generally run the highest resolution because they complain things are too small to see on their monitors.

A. From a gaming standpoint, this is wrong. You gain sharper, better-defined polys and less jagged edges from higher resolutions.

B. Anyone not running an LCD at it's native res is a fool that needs their eyeballs removed so that someone with an appreciation for aesthetics can use them.

So yes, it's good, but a lot of the time it's wasted power.

Yeah. A lot of the time you're idling in the Windows GUI. Which puts clsoe to 0 load on a video card, even with Vista's new GUI of +5 shininess.

Hell, your fancy-pants 2 GHz dual-core processor is wasted power most of the time.



But the times you DO need that power, it's nice to have.






You're not making a good case here. Your own numbers have shown that there's plenty of reason for a high-end video card to have a half-gig per processor, and your counterarguments rely on faulty assumptions and just plain evil(seriously, not running an LCD at it's native resolution is the 8th deadly sin).

[Rydian]

Er, wasn't a point I made earlier that not everybody needs to buy a top-end video card with half a gig of ram? That's what my comment on the sims 2 was about. It on integrated graphics is generally shitty, but you don't need a series 8 card for it.

I have a habit of not quoting so it gets kind of hard to tell where my points are directed. >_>; I'll try to remember to do it!

Also, I've seen integrated graphics with 256 megs of 'ram'. Yes, they can use that, but at like .5fps.

Infact, I saw an nvidia integrated 6150 allocate 1.3 gigs of ram to itself. :gonk: Total WTF moment there. Has almost nothing to do with the conversation, just. WTF, man.



Not everybody knows nearly as much about computers as you, and I've seen 4 people running an LCD at a lower resolution, one of them running it at 800x600, so they could read what was on the screen. I went in and showed them how well it looked at it's native resolution of 1024x768, but they changed it back because they had a hard time reading the text when it was smaller.

EDIT: Fixed typos. It's 4 AM.

[sweener2001]

then you either tell them to get glasses or adjust their dpi settings.

then ask yourself if this kind of person would even know that this videocard exists.

all you're doing is stating the obvious. "not everyone needs this card." congratulations, you've enlightened no one.

not everyone needs 65" plasma screens either. not everyone needs a computer.

sure, some moron will buy this card and then play nothing newer than BG II. It's bound to happen. But a lot of other people will buy it and play Crysis.

you're not making any kind of point here. that's what i'm saying.

[Rydian]

Okay then. That's what my original post that started this was saying, if I remember correctly. Which I might not since it's late and I'm too lazy to go and find it.

[MisterJones]

Who the hell would be using an old 1024*768 LCD, playing The Sims, and buying a dual-proc vidcard with a gig of RAM?

An average customer under the claws of an average salesman.