No more super fast high end cards?

[ArchAngel777]

Bah... I am pretty bummed out over this. I have $600 to blow on the next gen video card and do NOT want to a get a meager 8800GT just to have it 1-2 months and see nVidia release some balls to the walls card. Grrr... But my uber rig is not sitting collecting dust while I use this X2 + 1950 Pro (AGP) :-/ What to do... What to do...

I don't like the idea of AMD's GPUs because of their issue with AA... AA is so important that I will sacrafise other details just to get it and the ATI card doesn't do so hot with AA, or at least it 'didn't'... Not sure if these new cards are better or not.

The problem with dual GPU onto one card will be the diminshing returns. If I am going to pay for two cards on one PCB, then I expect twice the performance, not a 50% meager gain.

 

[bryanW1995]

8800gts is on the horizon, after that it will be up to amd I believe. 8800gt got moved up and clocked up to beat amd. if amd comes to market early with r680 then nvidia will release their next tiger...if not, prepare to wait until mid 08. AMD really screwed up r600 and phenom recently, but it is starting to look like they've finally done something right with rv670. I would suggest that you consult the magic 8 ball...

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: ronnn

Originally posted by: munky
The day a single card can not play my games well will be the day I quit PC gaming. Until 2 cards can guarantee me close to 100% performance improvement in every game, I will not buy into this marketing gimmick and primitive performance solution.

Famous last words - we will hold you to this.


Besides what card that is twice as expensive as its little brother, is twice as fast at every game?

At least if I buy a 8800gt, I know it will be faster than a 8600gts in every game that's not cpu limited. How appealing would the 8800gt look if instead it was just 2 8600gts cards superglued together, and relied on software to make it faster, which works well in some games and not in others?

 

[ronnn]

Not disputing the lack of elegance of dual gpu's and am not an expert. Still we are now up to quad gpu's that only make a real difference when multitasking or when a program is coded properly. I would expect next gen games to be coded for some type of multi gpu/cpu setups, as these are likely cheaper and more realistic to manufacture.

 

[Polish3d]

What horseshit. I don't want to buy a new fucking motherboard to buy a new video card

 

[tuteja1986]

Well power consumption is the biggest issue with high end card.

 

[tuteja1986]

Originally posted by: munky
My 1920x1200 monitor is forcing me to upgrade. I'm hoping there would be 1 card fast enough to run new games on it with high quality settings, not 2 cards.

8800U/8800GTX is your man

But you could just buy 2x8800GT 256MB/2x3750 for cheaper and get the same performance :!

The biggest problem is that game like crysis , call of duty 4 and others can't show any real mind blowing difference between high and Ultra high setting.

 

[Sylvanas]

I just recently bought an Abit IP35-E with 1xPCI-E 16x under the premise that I wont need a crossfire mobo as SLI/CF are 'unnecessary'- not happy if this is the way of the future, maybe dual GPU cards will be okay, but looks like I'm holding out for the next R700/G100.

 

[Dribble]

They are only saying this because they don't have a high end card to sell you right now. Wait till the second half of 2008 when the 9800GTX arrives...

 

[BFG10K]

This gimmick always surfaces when vendors have no single card high-end solution to offer as an upgrade.

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
This gimmick always surfaces when vendors have no single card high-end solution to offer as an upgrade.

The driver bugs and the hit-or-miss nature of SLi/CF support have really hurt the technology. I wish DX10 would have "fixed" the SLi/CF compatibility problems in the same way that DX10 is supposed to have fixed the AA compatibility problems. Assurance of at least a 30% gain in any game through multi-GPU support would have gone a long way toward making SLi/CF more viable. And someone needs to do an article on the current performance problems with DX10. What a mess!

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
lucky bastard...I'm lucky to get 2 hrs/day gaming.

try getting in a serious traffic accident - constant headaches and missing work leaves a lot of extra time for gaming [when you can't concentrate on anything else].

and 'who knows' ... i might just wait for the Dual-GPU X2 solution form AMD ... my 2900xt could be my third GPU
:roll:

i also don't want to buy anything [more] on credit ... when i am back to work full time [which coincidently may be about the time Penryn is released ... i am patient - i have to be - all in it's own good time] - except for my physical pain i am not suffering gameplay-wise in the slightest in DX9 at 16x10.

 

[bryanW1995]

that makes sense. I'm at 14x9 in win xp, so I should be able to run everything except crysis at max, and even that should be close.

 

[CP5670]

while the benchmarks do return higher scores with SLI enabled, the actual game play is adversely affected by random stutters and jerks, making SLI not suitable for anything but the benchmarking flyby.

So it's been three years now since SLI came out and they still haven't fixed this. This was exactly what drove me nuts about my SLI setup when I was using that. It occurs in most DirectX games but strangely not OpenGL ones, indicating that it's a driver problem and not a hardware limitation. The dual GPU concept is great in theory and I don't really care about the space/power/heat/etc. issues, but if it doesn't work properly across the board in games then it's next to useless.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: CP5670

while the benchmarks do return higher scores with SLI enabled, the actual game play is adversely affected by random stutters and jerks, making SLI not suitable for anything but the benchmarking flyby.

So it's been three years now since SLI came out and they still haven't fixed this. This was exactly what drove me nuts about my SLI setup when I was using that. It occurs in most DirectX games but strangely not OpenGL ones, indicating that it's a driver problem and not a hardware limitation. The dual GPU concept is great in theory and I don't really care about the space/power/heat/etc. issues, but if it doesn't work properly across the board in games then it's next to useless.

Exactly. I think a lot of people touting dual 8800GTs or HD3870s over a single high end card have never run a dual gpu system before. When SLI works it's great, when it doesn't it sucks. It's no surprise though because ATI/NV's marketing makes it sound like the issues are all squared away.

Along those lines, I find it interesting that even at the launch of the Crysis SP demo NV didn't have a good SLI driver for Crysis yet. I mean, it's not as if the game snuck up on them. We've all known it was coming for well over a year now and it's only one of the most hyped PC games of the year. Considering it's a TWIMTBP title, I'm pretty sure that they've had access to the game for a little longer than we have. So, if multi-gpu is the focus, why did we not get fantastic multi-gpu drivers before the launch of one of the year's biggest titles? The only reasonable answer I can think of is that it's really difficult to make multi-gpu drivers and that we might not see considerably better drivers for a while or ever.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: CP5670

while the benchmarks do return higher scores with SLI enabled, the actual game play is adversely affected by random stutters and jerks, making SLI not suitable for anything but the benchmarking flyby.

So it's been three years now since SLI came out and they still haven't fixed this. This was exactly what drove me nuts about my SLI setup when I was using that. It occurs in most DirectX games but strangely not OpenGL ones, indicating that it's a driver problem and not a hardware limitation. The dual GPU concept is great in theory and I don't really care about the space/power/heat/etc. issues, but if it doesn't work properly across the board in games then it's next to useless.

I don't have this issue with any of the games I play on either of my SLI setups. What mode are you using? I imagine that SFR might be more prone to that issue as more data has to be sent between cards to process a frame.

Pretty much every time that Nvidia releases an updated profile for a game that was having SLI issues they end up forcing it to use AFR and enabling some of the compatibility flags.

 

[CP5670]

Actually, I found that SFR had a marginally better success rate with that issue, but had other issues with many games. AFR exhibited the problem almost everywhere. This was on a 7800GT setup over a year ago and it's possible that things have changed, but that description sounds exactly like the issue I was seeing. In general, the higher the framerate is, the more you notice the effect. It was related to the lack of vsync in some way, but it was much worse than the tearing on a single card and often gave the impression of the framerate being lower than it really was. In some games, I was finding that both cards gave close to twice the (measured) framerate of one card but felt equally choppy due to this strange effect. In a few cases I was able to work around the issue by messing with some DXTweaker options, but was eventually finding that I was spending more time trying to get games to work correctly with SLI than actually playing them.

 

[bryanW1995]

I have your solution: send me your monitor. I'll even pay for shipping and the cost to send you my TN 1440x900 monitor. You'll thank me later of course, then I'll need crossfire..daamit damnit! oops, i mean, damnit daamit!

 

[thegimp03]

I don't think this will last long. There will always be the high end cards because it allows them to charge consumers $600+ and profit.

 

[ronnn]

Originally posted by: Frackal
What horseshit. I don't want to buy a new fucking motherboard to buy a new video card

Theres a good question. What type of motherboard will these new x2 cards need. Not sure you will need a new mb.