Originally posted by: Zenoth
It was a good gamble from nVidia to include SM 3.0 into their latest generation.
And it worked, because most of the people who bought, or want to buy a 6800 series GeFroce GPU usually do so with the excuse of "investment". So that they have SM 3.0 the day it will be in use, fully, or not.
In my opinion, nVidia fooled them big time, and got their money.
By the time games that uses SM 3.0 fully, or not even fully, the new generation will be out, and their "investment" excuse will fall into darkness. Technically speaking, there's what, one, two or three games ? That use SM 3.0 OFFICIALLY, WITHOUT modifying game files ? I know there is Painkiller, with a patch, and that's it.
And, buying a game because the game has SM 3.0 is not the reason to buy it.
You buy a game because its essential features and context are interesting you. The supported visual features are pure extras.
But again ... people fall for that. And give money blindly. In my humble opinion.
I wanted to buy one of ATi X800 series GPU, and then, I told to myself "oh, SM 3.0 huh ? hmmm...why not".
But after more thinking I said to myself "oh c'mon ... not mass support, and barely official support for SM 3.0 so far, and that UltraShadow II feature only good for two games including Doom 3, I mean, I don't shell out $300 to even $500 for the sake of being able to run two or three games at their highest settings, and then stop playing them because they're eventually and usually, ultimately linear and boring, unless there is a good multi-player mode".
Really ...
So I stayed with my 9800 Pro, which does the job extremely well, at good resolutions.
I'm waiting for R520 out of curiosity, first. Then, I might hype myself once it is officially revealed and benchmarked.
I'm not saying nVidia GPUs are "crap", overall. No. I'm just saying that even though they're good, they feature stuff that people fall for, just like a prey going straight into the trap. They got your money for your "investment" reasoning. They got it.