I am not impressed with the graphics card industry.

[Maximilian]

"This game alone gives players without high end monitors a real reason to justify saving up for a 7800 GTX. Those who want to play FEAR at the highest resolution and settings with AA enabled (without soft shadows) will basically have to use the 7800 GTX, as no other card available gets playable framerates at those settings, and the 7800 GTX does just barely (if uncomfortably)."

I took that from the F.E.A.R performance review on the front page. I think it sucks that a 7800GTX, the absolute best card out there is brought to its knees at 1600x1200 with aa/af on. This card is what.. 4 months old? 3? Many have been saying that none of todays games will even trouble this card at any setting. Well that view was correct for all of three months. A CPU would never be brought to its knees by any game in such a short amount of time. Buy an athlon 64 FX57/X2 4800 today, and three years from now you will still be playing games on it!. Hell my pentium 4 1.7ghz lasted me that long, all i needed to upgrade was the graphics card. With the healthy competition between nvidia and ati why cant they release somthing that will stay future proof for at least a little longer? I can accept that any card might start to stumble at some ridiculous resolutions/settings like 2048x2048x32 with 8xaa and 16xaf, but the settings fear were run at.... it dosent impress me one bit.

Sure, game programmers should utilise the graphics cards most up to date features, its just whenever they seem to do this it brings the thing to its knees and it takes a whole new generation to do what the older one couldnt at an acceptable framerate. Why is this? nvidia and ati suck? graphics cards are far more complex than cpus to design andmake future proof? games are becoming too graphically impressive too fast? newer game engines are incredibly inefficient at delivering a marginal increase in image quality? what am i missing here?

Short version of rant: Why do graphics cards go out of date and get brought to their knees so soon? It sucks! No other component becomes obsolete as fast as a graphics card. By obsolete i mean not useful for its original intended purpose anymore.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

****** happens -.-

 

[sonz70]

Same was said about BF2 when it first came out, that hardware would take a year to two to catch up to them game, wheras in reality, it took much much less.

 

[Rage187]

I only care about performance in the big 3 graphics engines

Doom3
Source
and the Unreal engine.



Games like FEAR, Farcry and CoD2 I could care less about since most new games will be running on one of the big 3 engines.


But I agree, there is no reason why FEAR runs like crap on the best graphics card when games that look better(like HL2 and Doom3) run perfectly smooth at the highest resolutions.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: Rage187
But I agree, there is no reason why FEAR runs like crap on the best graphics card when games that look better(like HL2 and Doom3) run perfectly smooth at the highest resolutions.

That's basically my view. FEAR may have nice graphics, but certainly not anything that much better than anything already out to justify such poor performance.

 

[Polish3d]

While I'm somewhat unimpressed as well, (I still think the GTX should have debuted with 512mb of higher speed ram) I think FEAR is an all around crappily designed engine.

Supposedly with all options cranked up the GTX gets better than 60fps stock in The Lost Coast, which is of course designed to tax hardware.

 

[Eureka]

Its what they call good business. Remember, they already have the future technology, they just don't release it. And games are probably optimized less-than-optimally to help speed along sales and "new" technology.

EDIT: Just note, if you had a card that would last you 10 years, you spend 400 once and not spend it again for 400 years. If you bought a 400 dollar card that lasts 3 years, that's about 1200 right there.

Norm

 

[rancherlee]

Remember when Quake 3 came out, The best card going at the time was the newly released Geforce DDR and it couldn't come close to maximum settings in the game. It happens all the time. It took along time for a card to come out that would run it at 1280x1024x32 with everything maxed.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Keep in mind the G70 Update (90nm I believe) is coming out soon, and the long rumored R580 or whatever may come out....eventually

 

[HDTVMan]

I dont believe any game is worth $440.00 $400 for the video card and $40.00 for the game.

I will pass until the video card is $200.00 and the game will probably be under 20 by then. Sad I would have liked to have played it.

 

[Munky]

One more reson to get consoles. My ps2 is what - like 5 years old, and the games just keep getting better, but the hardware requirements stay the same. It may not match the visual quality of today's PC games, but it still looks decent, and soon the consoles will have the upper hand in gfx again when the 360 and ps3 come out.

 

[BFG10K]

It's funny, back when the situation was reversed people complained that there were no games available to take advantage of the cards.

 

[Linearsoup]

how is games being faster then current vid cards a bad thing?would you rather have shite graphics@150fps

 

[zephyrprime]

It's because the technology advances so fast that stuff like this happens. The funny thing is, if ATI and NVIDIA both started to not produce anything but slow cards, games that bring video cards to their knees would stop happenning.

"newer game engines are incredibly inefficient at delivering a marginal increase in image quality?"

It's true that new game engines yield relatively little increases in image quality for the amount of processing power required but this is to be expected. It's only natural in any endeaver to go after the low hanging fruit first since it will yield the highest reward/cost ratio. This phenomenon holds true in the world of graphics technology. What we're seeing now is simply a consequence of the fact that many pieces of low hanging fruit have already be exploited. In the world of 3d graphics, the first low hanging fruit was 3d geometry (ala "star fox" or even "Final Fantasy 7"). The implementation of 3d brought about a huge increase in realism over the formerly 2d sprite animated world that came before 3d. The next thing to be implemented was texturing. Once again, this yielded a huge increase in realism but it came at an exorbitant cost in die space. Then, we got antialiasing and AF which provided a relatively little improvement in graphics quality while incurring a substantial increase in die space. Now, we're pushing strongly into the realm of pixel shaders. Shaders, because of their ability to run custom programs are becoming the biggest part of GPU in terms of die space. The processing demands that pixel shaders will eventually put on GPUs are humongous compared to what can now be called "simple" texturing and geometry.

So yeah, anyway, my point is that we're getting diminishing returns and that's just how it is so get used to it.

 

[Cheesetogo]

It's not Nvidia or Ati, it's the game developers. Source pretty much proved that with its incredible framerates.

 

[Polish3d]

Definitely true there. Source should be applauded while we ought to be demanding much better from game devs.

 

[lifeguard1999]

Originally posted by: rancherlee
Remember when Quake 3 came out, The best card going at the time was the newly released Geforce DDR and it couldn't come close to maximum settings in the game. It happens all the time. It took along time for a card to come out that would run it at 1280x1024x32 with everything maxed.

And Quake3 ended up being a benchmark for 5+ years (it still is used in some articles).

 

[lifeguard1999]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
It's funny, back when the situation was reversed people complained that there were no games available to take advantage of the cards.

QFT!!!

 

[CaiNaM]

run it at 1280 or 1024 and quit whining... no one is making you buy anything -- it runs and looks decent on mid-range hardware w/ lower rez

i finished F.E.A.R., enjoyed the graphics (tho the game got repetetive), and now i'm gonna play some Q4

 

[Kogan]

I am impressed with them. Graphics cards are actually advancing much faster than the games. Back with quake1, 640x480 resolution was high-quality and was the standard for the first 3d cards. I remember telling myself "as long as my video card can play at 640x480, there's no need to upgrade".

But as we advanced, people wanted more resolution and we got it. Now what- we're capable of playing some of the most advanced games at 60fps at 1600x1200 with aa/af. This only really started with the x800/geforce6 series - before then of course, most settled for less and didn't even know what aa/af was.

And I wouldn't judge anything by fear. I think the opinion around is that it's not very well optimized. Doom3 looks more impressive to me, and is much faster.

It would be nice to see a visually impressive game (not fear) that brings video cards to their knees and forces us to use low resolutions. Someone will eventually get around to making an engine that uses graphics comparable to those 3d-animated movies - the ones by pixar and squaresoft.

 

[klah]

X1800XT: 321 Million transistors
7800GTX: 302 Million transistor
A64 FX-57: 106 Million transistors

 

[Genx87]

lmao I remember a few years ago cards would do the same thing except at 800x600.

 

[VIAN]

Short version of rant: Why do graphics cards go out of date and get brought to their knees so soon? It sucks! No other component becomes obsolete as fast as a graphics card. By obsolete i mean not useful for its original intended purpose anymore.

Here's my answer:

Play at 768. At least that's what I've heard developers are saying, that any resolution higher than 768 is just too taxing for a GPU.

There you have it. Have a nice day.

 

[Khyron320]

1024x768 only way to go


Graphics really dont make the game its content.

 

[akugami]

The only reason I've been dissatisfied with nVidia and ATI lately is that I don't feel the 7800GTX and X1800XT are large enough boosts over the X800 to warrant the money they're charging. That's why I am passing on these. I will re-evaluate when solid information on the G72 and R580 GPU's are near release.